Magpie Bridge

By C.S. Hagen

CHICAGO to FARGO - In the not-so-distant future after the collapse of the US federal government, more than warlords, unrest, and religious fanaticism sweep the nation states. From secret societies long hidden to the modern world, an ancient threat, led by fox demon Danni Pan, re-emerges.

Recluse Soren Anderson lost everything, including his own heart, while on assignment in China, and for thirty years he survives in the shadows, with only his soul keeping his body alive. He comes face to face with his estranged daughter moments before he is forced to flee the city-state of Chicago. With nowhere to run but home to Norma, North Dakota, together they must find ways to cross factious borders, evade the evil that will stop at nothing to find him and repair the relationship with his daughter that Soren never thought possible.

But sometimes, as Soren soon learns, not even he can run fast enough, and he must fight to keep his daughter alive. For when forgiveness is not enough, blood must pay.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse UK
• Release date: Sep 12, 2014
• ISBN: 9781496990594

C.S. Hagen

Chris Hagen, born in Orange, California, is an old-Tianjin hand after seventeen years behind the bamboo curtain. From a one-room country school in the Ozark Mountains as a child to the first international school of Tianjin, China since 1949, Chris returned to America and graduated with a bachelor’s degree in communications from Wheaton College in 1995. After three years working as a journalist for the Gaston Gazette in North Carolina, Chris traveled back to China where he established himself as the first successful Western restaurateur in Tianjin until 2009, when he turned back to writing. Since then, Chris has been published in the Fargo Forum, the China Daily, the Wilson Times, and maintains his website, www.cshagen.com. Chris currently resides in Fargo, where he prepares for the release of his third book - The Ninth Tail, the other side of Magpie Bridge.

Book preview

Part one

Chapter One

Table Scars

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Rusty water dripped from a sagging ceiling on to a pockmarked table. The droplets pooled and slipped through a crack that ran through the only furniture Soren Anderson owned. Soren dipped a bony forefinger into the ruddy plash. Pipe water resembled blood, and then ink, then blood again from erratic neon light. Transformers buzzed like late summer yellow jackets.

He bought the table along with one rounded back chair from a belly-up bar on Goose Island, just before the Chicago city-state was formed and the island became Satan’s Sanctum, No Care Zone Number Fifty-Six. He needed to write, finish his story, but each time he brought pen to paper a nick in the hard wood caught his attention and his mind wandered. A gang fight, perhaps? A made man’s last mark before two in the head? Or maybe some woman’s boot heel, propped roughly on top for a sloppy screw. Three parallel lines along the table’s left edge resembled fingernail tracks. Cigarette burns formed a swastika in the middle.

The table had stories to tell. Just like him. If only it didn’t hurt so much to remember.

Soren ran his hand across the nicked surface, exposing a forearm through his worn trench coat, which doubled as a bathrobe. Fifteen scars starting below his hand’s meaty part led to his bicep. His arm was a fleshy, barren field tilled by a razor’s edge. Each discolored furrow was equally distant, a thumb’s width apart. One final space was left to cut on his other arm, a space to mark the thirty-first year since his heart was stolen. And then he might start on his legs. The worst scar however, wasn’t on his arms. Starting below his jugular notch it ran down his sternum, took a violent turn over his left pectoral muscle and ended at his armpit. The giant, pinkish L-shaped scar made him shiver every time he saw it through the soap scum of his bathroom mirror.

L for love or lost, love lost.

Soren turned back to the yellow notepad and read what he had crossed out with his Uni-Ball.

It wasn’t my fault. Danni Pan poisoned me. True, but a boring beginning.

Spilled gin smeared the second sentence, something about foxes and hearts. Skipping to number three, which ran the width of the page to the ninth pale blue line, it was the best he had written yet, but gave too much away.

I arrived behind the bamboo curtain with nothing more than a cold, one of those slow, comfortable sniffles that carry a husky, after sex voice but light enough to still cough through half a cigarette. And I escaped almost the same way, three years later, a fake Marlboro dangling from my lips, but without my heart.

Words. That’s all they were. But strung together pained him to read. Instinctively, he reached his right hand to his chest, still wishing, hoping to feel a beat, anything that resembled a pulse.

His veins were silent.

A cool breeze shifted the curtains, turning the jaundiced gauze into a flaming wall heralding spices from the Mexican restaurant across the street. Sometimes through his window, usually in autumn, when the breezes blew just right, he could smell something resembling Norma’s alfalfa fields, in the former state of North Dakota, and the scent would take him on a journey home, to Klara waving proudly from the back of a red convertible after winning the Miss North Dakota Pageant, and to his daughter, whom he hadn’t seen in thirty years.

Ah, Klara. Every single man within a hundred miles wanted to court her in those young days, but she only had eyes for him. She was his first friend, his first love. Before Danni he had only ever kissed Klara.

He missed her. Not a day passed when he didn’t wonder about their daughter Vivi, short for Olivia. Stomach cancer had taken Klara’s life nine years ago. He kept track of local events and obituary notices with a subscription to the Kenmare News. Vivi, as far as he knew, was still alive, but probably wanted nothing to do with him. The only photograph he had of her was a wrinkled three by five still folded in his wallet. She was six then, which would make her thirty-six now. If he had the opportunity to see her though, he would, but from a safe distance, just to make sure she was all right. A man in his condition couldn’t afford friends or family. They always died in the end.

His left thumb caressed a groove in the table. It formed the letter C almost perfectly.

That looks like a bite mark. But whose Lilliputian mouth could possibly bite the top of a table? He was procrastinating again.

Soren shook his head angrily and forced the pen’s tip through the notebook’s first few pages. Ink leaked from the tip and spread across the page. He was not a writer, but grammatology, like mechanics, always intrigued him. He had a story to tell, although nobody would believe him. They should though, everyone really should. Danni would find him sooner or later and retrieve what she had not taken that terrible night in Three Rivers, China. Already their yips and howls woke him at night. Fox screams had a way of unnerving a man especially in the dead hours of a crowded city.

His hand bumped a hard object under his unwashed, wife beater t-shirt. He gripped it tight and closed his eyes.

Is there enough time to finish?

The oblong object clung to an iron chain around his neck, and it was his only protection. Toumuk, they called it in the East. In English, it was nothing more than carved peach wood. Slowly, Soren withdrew the wood from beneath his shirt. The metal links jangled, conjuring hobbles and led balls and weighed unusually heavy in his palm.

So far the amulet protected him. When fox demons neared his senses heightened. Air gave him cottonmouth, but if he held his breath deep inside his vision cleared, his muscles tightened and inside, perhaps it was his soul, stirred.

He studied the amulet before slipping it back under his shirt. It was shaped like an Indian arrowhead. A strange, Chinese symbol was engraved in the wood’s center. He guessed it was a charm fox demons didn’t like. The symbol’s top resembled a horned beast with squiggly marks. At the bottom, lines connected by small circles resembled a Galilean star chart. It was the only gift from his one time friend, Little Jack.

Curse you god, Soren said. Curse you to my hell.

There were no gods. The gods were on a very lengthy vacation. He would live long enough to finish his story and warn the world, hopefully no longer than that. If nobody believed him then fuck them. Fuck them all.

Books at the far end of the table broke the harshest neon beams. Since his escape back to America he had collected every written work he could find on fox demons. The authors were most likely dead now, for he had never known another man like him. First, there was J.J.M. DeGroot, an eighteen ninety-two author of a six-volume series on the supernatural in China. Then there was Pu Songling, a seventeenth-century author who was either infatuated with fox demons or was one himself. In his books fox demons appeared as ghosts or tricksters who ate human hearts and sucked down souls like he drank gin. Sometimes they were benevolent, and helped a righteous king. Interesting reading but neither author offered ways to kill a fox demon. Sun Ce’s book Strategies of the Warring States Period taught him about toumuk, or peach wood, as a protective talisman. Once, in another collection written in Chinese, he read about an especially sinister fox demon named Su Daji who overthrew the Shang Dynasty nearly three thousand years ago. He couldn’t tell if her story was legend or fact, and decided it was a little of both.

Soren shook a last cigarette from his pack of non-filtered Giant Pandas, tried his lighter a dozen times before tossing it across the table and used the gas stove. He filled his lungs with the acrid smoke, enjoying the sensation of muscles tightening against his bones. It was the only pleasure he had.

He finished the cigarette in three puffs, burned his lip and cooled the injury with the last of his gin. He needed more if he was to finish his story.

Before unbolting the vertical locks on his door he turned up the trench coat’s collar, slipped on a pair of loafers and cocked a fedora low over his forehead.

Another trip to the trenches.

Sidewalks and busy streets were his battlefield. He preferred his room’s solitude to dealing with living people. His skin was paler than most, and he wore his trench coat and fedora no matter the weather. People with beating hearts had a way of seeing through the layers and discovering his secrets. Their judgment of him was evident in their eyes, the furtive glances followed by a slight nose wrinkling as they passed.

Or maybe it was just his smell. No shower or eau de toilette could rid his faintly sweet scent of cloves.

Soren poked his head from the entrance and waited before being satisfied no one was watching. Eyes glued to the well-worn hardwood floor, he closed the door gently behind him. He didn’t want to alert his neighbor in Two-B, an annoying young woman who had moved into the apartment next to his several months before. She had taken the apartment after Mrs. Papadopoulos’ death last summer of a heat stroke. Mrs. Papadopoulos spoke no English, but Soren always understood what she said. She had been a sweet, old soul. Two-B, however, was one of those alternative types, with a nose ring and purple hair, some tattoos, probably a lesbian because all her friends were girls. He peeped through the eyehole the day she moved in and caught her standing at his door, as if contemplating whether to knock. One hand on the railing he hurried down the stairs, turned right outside the tenement apartment and headed toward the nearest store, Mishka’s Liquors.

Soren risked the streets at night, when shadows brightened with flickering bar signs or droning streetlights. It was the best time for anonymity, when most people in his neighborhood were between their drinks, or had their eyes set on short-skirted streetwalkers who dared breach Satan’s Sanctum relative protection.

Prostitution, outside the No Care Zones, was illegal.

Keeping to the sidewalk’s inner edge he evaded protruding stairs and trashcans. He passed dark windows: Chinese herbalists, a fortuneteller’s parlor called Lok Tai Fook, a sex shop with mannequins clad in leather masks, and then he came to an intersection. The Clark Street Bridge was silent. A late night Cantonese vendor was packing chairs on to an overloaded, motorized three-wheeled bicycle. Behind him on elevated tracks, the first morning El Train rumbled closer. He turned right on Wacker Drive and inhaled the fishy Chicago River from across the street. He held his breath savoring the potent odor and the rippling sensation that coursed through his muscles.

Half a block from Mishka’s Liquors a man in a beanie cap emerged from a narrow alley. An alcoholic stench poured from his skin.

Excuse me, Soren said. He immediately regretted speaking for when he exhaled his muscles went limp.

You got a light?

Sorry, no.

Hey man. The man sidestepped to block his path. He spoke like an English man trying yooper English. Assist a brother out.

I don’t have a lighter.

He stepped closer and reached for his arm.

Soren recoiled, as if the hand was an attacking snake. He inhaled deeper and waited for the man’s aura to appear, which always came when he held his breath.

Listen to me, the man said. His voice was low and gravelly and he no longer tried to hide his English accent. Shadows hid his face. You must come with me if you want to live.

Soren backed up against protruding stairs.

Eight or nine of ten who behold her are defiled.

He’d heard those words before. Where?

Taken in by her beauty they’re defiled.

He didn’t want to listen.

Eater of souls, scavenger of hearts, within her arms sanity departs.

Shut up.

The beggar grabbed his forearm. It was his words now that shriveled his testicles to the size of raisins. Breathing in didn’t help distinguish his aura. He had none. Nervously, Soren scanned the street behind his assailant. A drunk staggering across the street glowed light brown. Two women emerging from a parked car had crimson halos.

In his experience only the dead and fox demons had no aura.

Soren pushed him back. Step away from me.

The man scowled. You have no bloody idea, do you?

Soren pushed past, but the man latched on to his shoulder, pivoting him. Streetlights dimmed. A distant car’s horn slowed, mooing like a dying cow. Air around him and within crackled with energy, and it coursed down his arm into his clenched fist and straight into the man’s cheekbone.

The man staggered. The car’s horn ended. Streetlights brightened. The man spat a long stream and wiped his lips before giving a short, disinterested chuckle. Soren readied for counter punch.

Not bad for a young pup. He massaged his jaw.

Fuck you. What do you want? What are you?

What I am is not important. The man raised his head, revealing a hawkish nose and scraggly beard. His lips were cracked and his teeth stained yellow. Under the sickening layer of stale booze Soren detected a sweeter, familiar scent. You are the last one. Prince Bigan wishes to meet you.

Prince who? I’m not going anywhere.

Fool. He hissed. Then we’re all bloody well done for. He stepped backward into the shadows. Can’t say I didn’t warn you.

Fucking drunk, Soren said. But his voice shook and he suddenly needed a drink more than ever. Soren reeled away, puzzled about the man’s scent until he reached Mishka’s Liquor’s glass door. The welcoming bell chimed. Punjab, the store’s graveyard shift manager, popped his head from behind a counter. Tobacco’s musky tang rushed outward and he remembered.

The man smelled like cloves.

Chapter Two

Out With a Bang

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Ah, good morning, Mister Einar.

Punjab’s high-pitched, cheerful greeting usually made him smile. Soren used pseudonyms at each place he was known. Here, at Mishka’s Liquor he was Mister Einar. At Soon Fatt Chinese Restaurant he was Mister Sorry Song. With the American Oil & Gas Reporter, the only source for a paycheck, he was Soren Anderson. To everyone else, Jack Smith, partly to remember his old friend Little Jack and partly because it was the most banal name he could think up. He frequented Mishka’s Liquor enough to know that it would have been awkward never to give a name so he chose one from the land of his ancestors, Norway, meaning lone army.

You will be wanting your usual, Mister Einar? Punjab said. Through the Plexiglas cage the clerk looked like he had just stepped out of a Wal-Mart catalogue, even though the last Wal-Mart store had gone belly up more than ten years ago. His long-sleeved, white uniform with blue apron were clean and starched stiff as cardboard.

Yes. Thank you Punjab. The clerk was always armed with a charming, big-toothed smile, an unusual trait for a man working the graveyard shift as long as Punjab. Originally from India, he bobbed his head side to side while punching up numbers for a liter of Booth’s gin and his Giant Panda cigarettes.

Anything else?

Soren shook his head and handed Punjab a hundred-tael bill.

It gives me great pleasure to be seeing you Mister Einar. You are working very much like my good self. Not easy, I’m afraid. No, not easy at all.

Nothing’s easy. Soren accepted his change through the cage’s trough.

Truer words my ears have never before heard. Thank you once again Mister Einar.

You’re welcome. Soren already had the carton open and thumped a cigarette between his lips. It stuck to the burnt spot on his lip and he peeled it back to the right side of his mouth.

Punjab handed him a Bic lighter. As we Chicagoans say, ‘on top of the house.’

Much obliged. Soren inhaled deeply and reached for the door. Two shapes, dressed in black, materialized from the darkness and careened toward him.

Punjab. You may want to— But it was too late. He tried to pull the door shut, but the handle was wrenched away. The first man to enter wore a ski mask, and he shoved Soren aside. A second man followed—bigger and meaner looking—his face disguised with nylon. Both carried handguns.

Empty the register! Now! The first robber stuck a terrible-looking pistol through the rounded opening but kept his attention on Soren.

I’ll shoot! Think too much mutha fucka, and you’ll never think again!

Soren inhaled, a long intake of breath that he held in his lungs. The second hand on the giant Timex above Punjab clicked. He blinked. These were simple punks, smart enough to disguise themselves. Both had black auras. Probably wanting cash for their next fix, which meant they were on the downside of a good high, most likely digital ecstasy. They would be temperamental, ornery, and they smelled like they hadn’t bathed in a week.

The white-faced clock ticked again.

Punjab was too good a man to be robbed. This kind of thing happened every day in the No Care Zone, a demilitarized area for misfits and outlaws where city-state laws no longer applied. Not here, not—

A strong arm tugged him from behind. Soren didn’t resist, but the blow to the back of his head forced him to his knees. Teeth smashed together, chipping a molar. Stars. The robbers’ excited shouts dimmed, candy bars at parade rest in front of his face blurred. He reached forward to stop his fall, but grabbed a handful of candy. His vision blurred around the edges, and the clock ticked a third and fourth time, which burst like a firecracker somewhere between his ears.

He grit his teeth. He was no stranger to pain. Even when he had thrown himself off a two hundred foot cliff at the Grand Canyon so many years ago, he had never lost consciousness. Took him three months to heal though.

Down mutha fucka! The robber behind him yelled. He focused on silver inches from his face. Three Musketeers. Next to it in orange sat a Reece’s peanut butter cup. The vacuum of noise disintegrated into foul language and angry demands. Soren felt the back of his head and his fingers came back wet. There was no fear, only anger gurgling upwards toward his throat. And he had dropped his cigarette.

Fuckers.

From behind the checkout counter Punjab’s face was ashen and he was fumbling with the register.

Don’t shoot, misters. Punjab pleaded. I only am working here, day and night, night and day. Don’t wanting harm to any good sirs.

I’ll fucking shoot you if you don’t hurry up. Punjab dropped bills on to the floor. The man with the ski mask slapped the Plexiglas cage with his free hand.

You’re a strong one, aint ya? The big man asked. He looked like the hunchback of Notre Dame.

Soren picked up his cigarette and rose to one knee. If it had been only him, he would have handed over the twenty-five taels and change he had left in his pocket. Robbing Punjab, however, made him angry. The man who had immigrated from Deli with his wife and four children five years before might get fired.

Don’t you move, bitch.

Soren stood. He knew one thing they didn’t; these petty thugs could not kill him. Hurt him? Yes. He had been shot once before in London for his wallet. The bullet had gone through his shoulder and the wound had taken five hundred and sixteen hours to heal.

Armed robbery, assault with a deadly weapon, Soren cleared his throat and squared his shoulders. His jaw ached and he spat the loose chunk of tooth on the floor. The big man tried to force him back down.

Stay down. I’ll shoot you!

"Now kidnapping. Don’t you know that armed robbery is a dead end street anymore? There’s video inside and out, all of it gets fed directly into the police station.

They’re probably on their way now.

He had attracted the first robber’s attention again.

What should I do? The big man threatening him said.

She said to shoot him if he smacks his lips. The first robber said.

What was he talking about, ‘she said?’

She’s gonna be pissed. Didn’t say shit about no robbery.

Quit your belly aching and do what we’re here to do.

Punjab tried stuffing the filled paper bag through the opening but dropped it on the floor.

Mutha fuckin, cock-suckin’ curry muncher!

I’m sorry! So, so sorry.

Punjab, Soren said. Don’t be sorry to low-lifes like these.

Hey, you wanna die old man? The big man raised his pistol again. His hand was shaking. Sweaty patches leaked through the nylon at his neck. Soren dragged on the cigarette until his lungs were full and burned his lip again. The big man’s eyes went wide.

Perfect.

He spat the butt in the big man’s face, and grabbed his hands, forcing the pistol upwards.

Oh, you done signed your obituary now, mutha fucka! The first robber yelled. In the distance police sirens wailed.

Shoot the bitch! The big man said.

Soren twisted the man’s hands, bones cracked. The pistol dropped to the floor.

You like that? Soren asked. He twisted harder. The big man yelped in pain. Not so tough without your gun, are you?

A shredding noise ensued followed by coins bouncing across the floor. Punjab’s paper bag tore open when the first robber ripped it from the tray. The clerk disappeared behind the bulletproof glass.

You’re a dead man, cock sucker. A pointed instrument jabbed into his back, three inches to the left of his spine.

Here it comes. What it will feel like this time?

Bang, Soren said. He felt like laughing.

The shot made his ears ring. Sulfurous smoke filled his nostrils. His body moved forward, into the big man and a potato chip rack. He tried to breathe but his lungs weren’t working. The big man bowled him over.

His legs became rubbery, his knees crumpled and he flew backwards against the Plexiglas. Candy bars flew in all directions. He struggled once to right himself, tired and dropped.

Fuck. The big man was bleeding from his shoulder. You shot me. You fucking shot me through him. He reached toward the wound with his hand and screamed. My fucking hand. He broke my fucking hand.

The man in the ski mask suddenly bent close. His breath reeked like sour milk.

Sweet dreams cock sucker.

Soren closed his eyes, concentrating on the air, but his forced gasps stuck in his throat. The pain wasn’t as bad as the first time. He only needed to breathe.

Something snapped around his neck. Sirens wailed closer than before.

Quit whining, bitch. Pigs are here.

I can’t believe you shot me.

The door’s bell chimed. Voices began to fade.

Did you get it?

Hurried footsteps followed. The door clicked shut. Car doors slammed and tires peeled away.

Mister Einar!

Drowsy. How long had it been since he had a full night’s sleep? He