sickles and scythes. The bloody tatters remaining of Jing were pounded
into the hard ground under their sandals--before the six took their
weapons to each other.
The only apparent survivor of this melee had a shortlived triumph, as
he was murdered shortly thereafter by a middle-aged schoolteacher
wielding a pair of hedge-trimming shears, with which she deftly snipped
his left carotid artery. He bled out in less than a minute, judging
from the blood trail.
The teacher then used the shears on herself, plunging them into her
belly more than ten times before shock and loss of blood overcame
her.
A block away, four women were killed by a fifth when she drove a
forty-eight-year-old Ford tractor into, and then back and forth over,
the four until the tractor ran out of gasoline an hour later. She fell
asleep sitting there.
In the town's only decent food market, nineteen people who had fled
there to avoid the carnage were trapped inside when a teenaged girl set
the place on fire. They were all cooked. The girl in turn was killed
by an elderly woman who sneaked up behind her and smashed her skull
with a. shovel, and she in turn was slain by a very large naked man who
grabbed and fell on her, suffocating her under his bulk as he lay there
giggling.
In a period of six hours, ninety-seven residents were killed,
twenty-one others were wounded seriously enough so that they would
later die from their injuries, and a hundred more were injured badly
enough that they needed hospitalization. Nobody knew about this
immediately, because the landline communication wires out of town had
been cut and then burned by a man who used part of the wire to hang
himself.
The town of Longhua had seen better days.
Thursday Quantico, Virginia
Michaels looked up from his laptop and the hardcopy reports,
photographs, and vids, at Jay.
'How did we get this? It's so detailed.'
Jay said, 'Some of the pictures and vids are retro-spy sat and computer
augs, some came from the Chinese investigating team, some from a bashed
up and bloody camera found on the scene. The reports we got from my
friend in the CIA, who got it like the CIA usually gets such
things--they bought it from one of their Chinese computer spies set up
to find such things. It's all fresh stuff, really fresh.'
Michaels looked back at the hardcopy picture of the women who had been
murdered by tractor. They were mostly mush, and hardly recognizable as
humans.
'What do we know? And why do we at Net Force need to know it?'
Jay said, 'Longhua, China, a mountain town, a hundred and fifty
kilometers or so north and east of Beijing, approaching old Mongolia.
Nothing much happens in Longhua--or at least it didn't use to.
'According to my CIA mole, there's another village, called, ah'--he
looked at the laptop on the table in front of him--'Daru, which is a
