Necropath by Eric Brown Read Free Book Online

like
damage goods."
    Sukara pulled on a short black skirt, a clean red
T-shirt. She flicked on her lighter, opened the glass door of the
spirit-house, and lit a candle, placing a piece of banana beside it
as an offering. She tipped her head forward and murmured a short
prayer. "No violence today, no bad things. Spirits guide me, I
promise to be good."
    She found her mask, to keep out the filthy city
air, and slipped it over her head. She preferred the type that fitted
over her nose and mouth, covering more of her scar than just the
mouth-masks. With her long hair falling over the rest of the face,
she hoped that people wouldn’t notice.
    She turned off the light in the room, locked the
door behind her and hurried down the dark stairs. The street was a
solid caravan of cars and trucks, fumes hanging low. Advertising
lights were coming on in the dusk. Overhead, fliers screamed like
wronged spirits, tail lights blurred in the pollution.
    She made it in good time to the station and caught
the trans-Bangkok express to the station closest to the Chao Phraya
river. Sukara hung on a strap, squashed between two fat men. The trip
took just over two hours and she wished she’d brought along a
comic to pass the time. Instead she closed her eyes and thought about
her sister, and invented a fantastic future in which her sister met a
rich, handsome man who took her to a colony planet and they had lots
of children and were happy. She ran this fantasy almost every day,
with variations, and the variation she played today was that her
sister visited Earth and found Sukara and said, "Come back and
live with us." She smiled to herself, both at how wonderful that
would be, and also how unlikely. She told herself that she should not
think of herself in these fantasies—they were fantasies for her
sister, and if she wished too hard for things to happen for herself,
then they might not come true for her sister.
    And then the train reached the Chao Phraya, and
Sukara struggled out and up the escalator to the street.
    Lights advertised bars and strip clubs and
brothels. The street was full of strolling men, the occasional
working girl in heels and strip rags and little else. No one glanced
twice at Sukara as she hurried down the street, and she felt safe,
anonymous. These were the times when she was glad she wasn’t
beautiful, when her beauty would have attracted the eyes of the
cruising farang men.
    She came to the entrance of the Siren Bar and
climbed the rickety wooden stairs. The bar and dance floor and the
other rooms, the mirrored rooms and the cubicles and the poolrooms,
were built out over the river. Sometimes, in the early hours when
business was bad and the music stopped, she could hear the scummy
water of the river sloshing about under the floorboards, and Sukara
would play the fantasy that she was aboard a boat sailing downriver
into the bay of Bangkok.
    Fat Cheng was in his usual seat at the bar. He
swivelled when he saw her, great bulges of white-shirted fat pressed
through the chromium struts of the barstool. She wondered how his
slit eyes could see through so much flesh.
    "Little Monkey, you late, girl."
    She pulled off her mask. "Train slow, Fat
Cheng."
    "Hokay. You go get shower, customer waiting."
    Sukara felt a quick disappointment that she would
have no time to herself, then a surge of curiosity. "Who, Fat
Cheng? You know him?"
    "Regular, little Monkey. Ee-tee."
    "Which Ee-tee?"
    "I don’t know which Ee-tee. I didn’t
ask name. Now you go get shower, hurry up."
    She ran through the bar. One of the girls, the
tall, beautiful, sophisticated women who chatted to businessmen and
politicians about world affairs— then ended up flat on their
backs getting fucked like every other working girl—saw Sukara
and hissed in imitation of some leering extraterrestrial.
    Sukara ignored her and scurried to the showers.
    While she soaped herself, luxuriating beneath the
pounding needles of hot water,