Lethal Circuit by Lars Guignard Read Free Book Online Page B

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.
    “Who are you?” Chen asked.
    “I’m a backpacker,” Michael said.
    “Nice to meet you, Backpacker.”
    In the next instant Michael felt his head smashed down to the deck of the injection molding machine. What had been a knife to his Adam’s apple was replaced by a cold metal bar. Michael was beginning to reconsider his tactics. Perhaps a reasoned response wasn’t the way to deal with these guys. But he wasn’t an idiot. A break for it now would likely result in a snapped neck, so he breathed the best he could through his constricted throat, waiting for an advantage. His cheek to the metal press of the molding machine, he looked up to see the other half of the mold on its hydraulic piston. The only positive thing about the situation was that the machine wasn’t turned on. That advantage was quickly stripped from him with Chen’s depression of the industrial grade switch.
    “What are you doing here?”
    Michael tried to respond, but found his tongue didn’t work very well with his face flattened on top of the steel mold. What he got out was a mumble, barely discernible even to him.
    “I said, why are you here?”
    “Traveling,” Michael managed to grunt out.
    “Whom do you work for?”
    “Nobody.”
    “Do you think I am a fool?”
    Chen signaled his goons and they powered the metal bar down further across Michael’s throat. Michael knew that it would take only a hint more pressure to collapse his trachea; he just hoped that his aggressors knew it too. After all, if they wanted information, killing him wasn’t the way to go. Of course neither was molding his face into a cheery half globe of the Earth, but given the sudden hiss of the hydraulics above, Michael couldn’t dismiss that the latter might be exactly what they had in mind.
    “I said nobody, I don’t work for anybody.”
    The hydraulic press began its descent toward Michael’s face.
    “Why are you here?”
    “I was curious.”
    Chen filled Michael’s entire