The old lady asked, "So why did you come to Sampah?"
The bandaged man looked towards her, silent.
Around thirty minutes had passed since they were shoved into the room, hands tied to one another. They managed to set themselves down side by side in a pair of chairs in front of the large desk, their hands dangling in between. Before that, those thirty minutes were spent in silence, staring at the ceiling, the walls, the door on the side of the room and the giant map sitting on the end of it.
The bandaged man didn't answer her when she asked the first time.
The old lady asked again, "What are you doing in Sampah?"
The bandaged man stared at her for a while before reaching into his rucksack with his one free hand. He pulled out the lunchbox from it. It was a small, metal box, held together with rusting clasps. It used to have some sort of a colour scheme, but now it was simply a dying, metal sheen with patches of red, blue, and orange, stuck onto the box in small patches of paint, slowly peeling away in dried, shrivelled flakes. He laid it on the table and undid the clasps. The old lady peered closer out of curiosity.
The bandaged man opened the lunchbox. The old lady saw its contents.
It took her a while's worth of staring before she said, "Ashes?"
The bandaged man didn't answer. He merely stared at her as she spoke.
"I see," the old lady asked, "You're here to bury it here?"
The bandaged man remained silent.
The old lady made another guess, "You're passing through here to bury it elsewhere?"
The bandaged man kept quiet.
The old lady spoke, "If so, that's-"
Just as she spoke, muffled sounds broke out from behind the door. The two turned around to see what it was. The sounds persisted for some time, with small pauses in between.
Then it fell silent.
The doorknob turned itself with a heavy, mechanical click.
The door swung inwards.
In stepped Aqib, the tall, burly guy who led them through and back from the town outside. He kept a steeled gaze at the old lady and the bandaged man as he moved to the wall beside the door, planting his back against it.
Coming after him was a woman. She was a dark woman whose skin, unlike Aqib, was of natural disposition rather than of external factors. She was a head shorter than Aqib and had greying hair. Yet, despite that, she seemed relatively young, with a smooth complexion and an energetic gaze, only soiled by the sweat and dirt present across her face. She was slim, with an air of athleticism to her steps.
The dark woman dropped herself onto the chair on the other side of the desk, facing the old lady and the bandaged man.
"Welcome to Sampah, you two," she heartily announced. Her voice was surprisingly deep, with a degree of suave present in her words without sounding loquacious.
The old lady nodded, the bandaged man remained silent.
"So, let's get things out of the way first," the dark woman said, "What are you two doing here?"
The old lady answered first, "We're here to take shelter."
"Shelter? This is a trading hub," the dark woman said, "Not an inn."
"Temporal shelter," the old lady added, "When we're back on our feet with supplies, we'll move on."
"I hear you say 'we' a lot," the dark woman asked, "Is goggle boy here part of it?"
As the dark woman gave the question, the old lady made a furtive glance to Aqib on the back.
"He is with me," she answered.
"I'll see to that," the dark woman replied and turned towards the bandaged man.
"What's your business here, goggle boy?"
The bandaged man stayed silent as before, endlessly staring towards the dark woman from his hazy viewports.
"You hear me, goggle boy?"
"Guy's a mute freak," Aqib answered from behind.
The dark woman looked at Aqib for a while before looking back towards the bandaged man.
"So you cannot talk," she said
The bandaged man kept quiet.
"That lunchbox," she pointed towards the metal box sitting open on the table, "You're hungry?"
She reached towards it, aiming to grab on the handle. She extended her fingers, graced her shadows on the box's surface and touched the table's surface instead.
A moment of disorientation lingered in the dark woman's head for a moment. She looked at the table again. The lunchbox was there, only that her fingers were a mere inch away from it. She could've sworn it was nearer than that. She stood up from her chair and reached once more, trying to grab onto the box.
She touched the desk again.
The lunchbox was still a mere inch away from her fingers.
She looked towards the bandaged man. She couldn't see where she sat from before, but with a new angle, she could see his quiet fingers, grabbing onto the handle of the lunchbox. His eyes were fixed onto her hand, his arms tense with anticipation.
"Quick hands," she commented.
A metal barrel poked the bandaged man's head from behind.
Aqib pointed the pistol from his belt at the back of the bandaged man at point-blank range, "You think that's funny, boy?"
"Stand down, Aqib," the dark woman said.
Aqib tried to protest, "Boss-"
"You welcomed them to our town with a zip tie and a gun to the face," she said, "You were going to take them to jail on account of simply being suspicious. It's natural they'll be on edge."
Aqib couldn't relent, "But-"
The dark woman's tone changed. Her gaze turned into a glare, staring into Aqib's eye with laser focus. Her smooth pronunciation was discarded, with only her deep, damning voice remaining as she spoke his name.
"Aqib."
He kept the gun up, but only for a moment. He eventually lowered the barrel and slotted it back in his belt with great reluctance.
"Sorry about that," the dark woman apologized towards the bandaged man and the old lady, her voice returning to normal, "Bandit raids' are rising every day. Our forces are on edge every day, keeping things afloat."
The old lady broke a smile and spoke, "We understand."
"No, you understand, that's what I understand," the dark woman corrected her and turned towards the bandaged man, "I want to know if he understands as well."
The bandaged man didn't answer.
The dark woman pointed towards the lunchbox and asked, "Do you mind if I take a look?"
The bandaged man was unresponsive, at first.
Slowly, but surely, he released the pressure off his hands and let go of the lunchbox, his eyes still stuck onto the dark woman, deadpan and emotionless.
The dark woman held onto the lunchbox and pulled it towards her side of the desk as she sat. She turned it around and checked its contents. Her eyes lingered at the inside of the lunchbox for a while. She then looked up to see the bandaged man for a second before going back to the lunchbox. She closed it and locked the clasps. With gentle fingers, she held it up to her ears and lightly shook it.
She pushed the box back to the bandaged man. The bandaged man grabbed onto the box and stuffed it back into his rucksack.
"I apologize for me and my team's insensitivity," the dark woman said.
"It's fine," the old lady replied, "You have your responsibilities, I'm sure."
"No need for that, just yet. I still have more questions," the dark woman said, raising a palm towards the bandaged man, "But not for you. We'll come back to you in a moment."
The dark woman then turned towards the old lady, "I've got questions for you."
The old lady looked up towards the dark woman, "I've answered all I could towards Aqib. Was it Aqib? I'm sorry if I misheard."
Aqib shot the old lady a look of filth.
"No, no, it's a different kind of question you got from him," the dark woman said, "My question for you is this-
"Why did you lie about the attack?"
The old lady didn't display a single change to her expression. She kept a clean smile and said, "What do you mean?"
"If it helps you understand better, let me explain," the dark woman said, "Your account for the attack was inaccurate to every other report we had before."
"Do elaborate," the old lady said.
"For one, you claim you and goggle boy here survived because you managed to hide under his body, which seemed dead enough to pass the bandits," the dark woman said.
She then turned towards the bandaged man, who had been staring straight towards her for the better half of the minute, completely stationary.
"That I can believe," the dark woman said.
She continued, "What more is that you managed to scavenge some bullets the bandits somehow missed; a good deal of it too."
"We were lucky," the old lady answered.
"You even had the heart to take care of the bodies," she added.
"I am quite sentimental, yes," the old lady added.
The dark woman asked, "You want to know what we usually hear from our common reports?"
The old lady nodded, "I'm all ears."
"Well," the dark woman said, "The reports we receive is that the carriages are usually found burnt."
The old lady was silent.
"In the off chance we found a fresh attack, we usually find fatal wounds and incisions on the corpses, either across the neck or right through the skull," she said, "All made prematurely before the fires were started."
The old lady kept quiet.
"We couldn't salvage anything from those carriages," she said, "Because quite frankly, there's nothing to salvage from it."
The old lady didn't reply.
"We've always gotten reports like this, with the same descriptions from the past year, and the year before that. Almost nothing was different between them," she said, "And now, right when we're experiencing our worst year of attacks, a poor old woman and her grandson comes in with a prized Kertau telling us a different story."
"Maybe they've changed their methods," the old lady said.
"For the worse?"
The old lady didn't reply.
"I'm giving you hospitality right now because you two have been cooperative with our forces, despite how unreasonable they might have been," the dark woman said, "But civility is a commodity. It is how this town's been run for the better part of the decade. They barter their items with value; we barter our protection with trust.
"And right now, you're losing a lot of credit."
She loomed in closer, towards both the bandaged man and the old lady. Her voice dropped down to the dark, oppressive tone she just held for Aqib.
She growled," What are you two doing in my fucking town?"
Just as she spoke, the door was knocked on twice, catching the attention of all four occupants of the room. Aqib, nearest to the door, turned the doorknob and opened it by a fraction, checking who's outside.
He stepped out and left the door ajar behind him, giving nothing but a disembodied voice as he left, "What-"
The dark woman asked, "Who's that?"
Her question was left unanswered for a good few minutes as she started at the closed door, waiting for a response from the faint voices sounding from outside.
The door swung open again and in stepped Aqib. This time, his expression was different. The look of hostility and contempt he used to give to the bandaged man was gone. The face he held now was one of fear and alarm. He brought two men with him; one of them was the man he'd given his revolver to at the main road, carrying a sack full of bullets and the dagger the bandaged man came with in his rope belt. The other guy was a man the old lady and the bandaged man hadn't met before. He was dressed in the same jumpsuit as everyone else. He stood tall and lean with a hunched back, compressed by the giant backpack he carried on his back. He had a dust-coloured shemagh wrapped around his face with a knot tied to the side of his head, leaving a small portion of his eyes exposed.
The dark woman asked, "What's going on?"
"I sent a recon team to check on the carriage on the way back," Aqib said as he pointed towards the sack and the knife, "We confiscated these when we found them."
"Well," the dark woman demanded, "What did you find?"
Aqib gestured towards the man in the shemagh. The man, visibly tired, shambled towards the dark woman.
"Lay it to me, Chen," she said.
The man in the shemagh, Chen, did a double-take, glancing towards the old lady and the bandaged man for a good while before looking back.
"I'm not sure if I can disclose this in front of unidentified individuals, Boss,” he said.
“We’ll know for sure who they are after you tell us,” the dark woman, Boss, said.
Chen turned to his back once more. He looked towards the bandaged man. From behind the cloth, it was hard to tell what his expression was; the only clue given was from his eyes. Small and thin, they leered at the bandaged man, holding as much apprehension as Aqib had for him.
He sighed.
“Okay.”
Chen gave out every single detail he could muster up about the carriage. He left out nothing. He described the sight, both far and near. He described how the bodies laid across the ground on a mixed pool of blood, boiling underneath them under the sun. He talked about the smell, and the overwhelming stench of rusting metal, intensified by the scorching heat of the afternoon. He brought up the carriage, and the fact that it was still standing on four wheels when they found it was nothing short of a miracle. He finished with a mention of a lone body, sitting in front of the carriage, away from the pile. They found it as a shrivelled, mangled corpse, torn by gunfire. The only discernible feature Chen could make out of it was that it belonged to an old man, and that it wore a straw hat.
A long silence laid in the wake of the man’s words.
“Tell me about the bodies again,” Boss said.
Chen asked, “The little girl?”
“No,” she said, “That bald one.”
Chen then repeated himself, this time in more vivid detail. He put great emphasis on her lifeless expression, drowning under dried blood that caked her torso, already cracking into flakes when he found her. He talked about the source of the blood; a deep, messy incision he found below her throat. Soft, tangled flesh was pulled out from one side of the cut, reaching out from her neck like wilted, crimson branches.
Boss asked again, “Anyone else with similar cuts?”
“There were some,” he answered.
She asked, “Who were they?”
Chen gave their descriptions.
"You said you found shotguns," Boss said.
"Yes," he answered as he threw his arm to his back.
He reached into a compartment on the top of his backpack and fondled it for a while. With one smooth jerk, he pulled out a shotgun, dirtied with visible use and age present on its wooden stock and metal body. He handed it towards Boss. She held onto it and examined it. She flipped it around and checked the stock.
She saw the logo that was carelessly scrawled across it.
She started at it for a moment, her pupils dilating as she kept her eyes on it.
Her eyes still on the logo, she pumped the gun a couple of times, checking the ejection port as she did.
"It's been emptied, Boss," Chen said.
Boss handed the weapon back to him. He slotted it back into his backpack as she remained silent for a while, sinking her chin onto her palm.
Aqib stepped towards her, “Boss?”
Boss didn’t answer. She kept her face down, letting her thoughts simmer in her head, stirring the man’s words like a bubbling pot.
Then she looked towards the bandaged man.
He caught Boss’s gaze and returned the act, staring straight at her with no hesitation. She could almost see her reflection on the hazy lens on his goggles. There was nothing she could tell from the bandaged man’s face. Joy, jubilation, sorrow, dejection, vexation, rage, dread, distress, unease, agitation; those were all expressions beyond him. What he held in his featureless demeanour was something unexplainable. It was like an infant’s innocent stare, only that its purity was simply a guise for indifference.
She pointed towards the bandaged man and spoke, "You."
The bandaged man gave no reaction.
"I know you can understand me," she turned towards him, "Tell me, what are you doing here? Hand signs, dancing, playing charade; tell me, any way you can."
The bandaged man was motionless at first, watching Boss move her mouth from the other side of his goggles as if she's a lunatic.
Then, a few seconds later, he raised his hand.
It was an uneven hand, with the skin wrapped around the knuckles like a thin layer of leather. Splotches of beige splattered across its dark surface like some sort of dermatological disease. Its fingernails, sharp, coarse and uncut, stuck out like a sore thumb upon his actual thumb.
The bandaged man split his index finger outwards and pointed towards the wall behind Boss.
Boss looked behind her and saw the map hung on the far side of the room's wall. She looked back to the bandaged man's finger and gauged its elevation. She looked back and forth, pinpointed where the bandaged man directed on the map, and put on an expression of disbelief.
She asked the bandaged man, "You know where that is, right?"
The bandaged man gave no reply.
Boss pointed to the upper part of the map, right below the thick, red ridge.
"That's where you came from," she said.
Boss then moved her finger downwards, aiming at a specific part of the map, right on the ridge.
"This is where you're at now," she said.
She then split her hand into an open palm and circled the big, empty space of the map that sat below the red ridge,
where the bandaged man pointed his finger towards.
"That's Peris," she said.
The bandaged man's finger didn't move.
"You even know what kind of place Peris is?"
The bandaged man's finger remained motionless.
"That's no man's land," she said, "If not the bandits, it's the Honyets; and you'd wish it's the bandits who have you instead."
The bandaged man's finger stayed upright.
Boss kept her gaze on him, both eyes widened with dubiety.
Then she laughed.
It was a long giggle at first, then it turned into a howling roar. She turned everyone's head. Chen stood before her, unsure of what to say or do. It echoed across the small room, her chortling fits filling the tiny space.
She pushed herself behind Chen, giggles still leaking out of her lips.
She asked the man holding the sack and the dagger, “That’s his knife?”
The man nodded.
Boss snatched it away from his hand, pulling the blade out of its scabbard as she walked towards the bandaged man and the old lady, a grin persisting on her face.
With one swipe she cut the zip tie between their hands with the bandaged man’s dagger.
Aqib was stunned, quickly reaching for the pistol in his belt as he exploded, “Boss, what the hell?”
“Four of us and two of them. I doubt the old one could do anything to us, so make that four against one,” she said as she threw away the cut zip tie, “We’ll manage if they try anything in here."
Then she paused for a look at the bandaged man.
"Unless…"
The old lady rubbed her wrist, easing the sore ache from her hand. The bandaged man simply pulled his hand back to the chair, seating it on his thigh.
Boss lightly tapped the bandaged man’s neck, knocking it with the scabbard of his dagger.
“Get up,” she commanded him.
Slowly, without averting his gaze, the bandaged man rose from his chair, standing on the spot.
“Follow,” she said.
The bandaged man followed Boss to the other end of the desk. Aqib held a tight grip on his pistol, watching them with a tense eye.
"Stand here," she commanded.
The bandaged man stopped where he stood, right at the corner of the desk.
Boss reached towards a drawer, which sat on the other side of the desk from where the bandaged man stood.
From there, she placed the dagger and the scabbard on the desk and pulled out a revolver. It was virtually identical to the one Aqib once had, before he gave it away to the man holding the sack at the main road outside. The only significant difference was that the hammer was gone, which instead had a smooth rim across the top where the hammer would've extended from.
She pushed against the cylinder release and out came the cylinder. All five holes were empty. She reached into the drawer and fetched one golden, flat-tipped bullet. She slotted it into the hole on the top. Carefully, she pushed the cylinder back in, where the bullet aligned with the barrel.
"I'll be fair with you," she said, showing the gun to the bandaged man, "This is double-action."
She took the dagger away from the scabbard, holding it by its blade. She lifted it from the desk, examined it for a moment and handed it towards the bandaged man.
Aqib called out, "Boss-"
"Stand down," she said.
"But-"
She lowered her tone, "I'm not repeating myself."
Aqib strained his expression, veins showing in his palm as he pulled out the pistol from his belt. The man who brought the dagger with him too pulled out the revolver Aqib gave him; the sack of bullets in one hand, gun in the other.
The bandaged man held the dagger back. He looked down at it and checked it with both hands. He examined the edge, brushing his fingers against the notches on the blunt side. He turned it around, slowly waving the dagger, weighing it in his hand. He lightly tapped the sharp end, poking his index finger with it.
He then reached the desk for the scabbard, grabbing it and stuffing the dagger into it.
"No, no," Boss stopped him.
The bandaged man looked up to Boss, still holding the dagger above the scabbard.
"Put that down," she said.
The bandaged man put it down.
"No, not the knife," she said, "The scabbard."
The bandaged man complied. Still, he flipped open his overcoat, storing the dagger, blade exposed, into his rope belt.
"No, no, no," Boss repeated, "Hold it out."
The bandaged man paused as he looked up to the Boss. He released his coat, letting it fall over his rope belt.
"Good," Boss said, "Now here's what you're going to do."
She raised the revolver and aimed it towards the bandaged man's head.
"Before I shoot you," she said, "Cut my left ear."
