you cry, you die. chapter 3

The desktop fan sounded like a bag of spanners in a washing machine. It was doing fuck all against the soup hanging in the room—thick, humid Bangkok air leaking in from the street and mixing with the sweat and stale piss of a dozen gamers.
Vic sat hunched over the monitor, his face washed in the harsh, flickering blue glare of the screen. He brought up the encrypted mail client. The connection was lagging, bouncing off a shell company server in the Caymans before routing through eastern Europe, but it would have to do.
He didn't have time to muck about.
His fingers hammered the sticky, grease-coated keys:
Bronson's gaff is completely turned over. Someone isn't just looking for him; they're looking for whatever the fuck he was carrying. Confirmed. Yankees are in the frame for his disappearance. They had me in a black site for forty-eight hours.
He paused, breathing through his nose, eyes darting to the glass door leading out to the soi to check the shadows. He kept typing:
Find out who he was drinking with in Bangkok before he went dark. And I want a deep dive on what the Agency's local station chief is currently doing.
Vic stopped. His index finger hovered over the optical mouse. He pulled up the background diagnostics, checking the proxy cascade to make sure the trace was properly buried under three layers of garbage data.
Green light.
He clicked. The progress bar crept across the screen for a tense couple of seconds before flashing the text: Message delivered.
No hesitation. He wiped the browser cache, scrubbed the local temp files, and shoved the keyboard back. He stood up, rolled his shoulders, and melted back out into the neon-soaked chaos of the Bangkok night, leaving the terminal glowing in the empty shop.
The neon from the first cyber caff killed the night vision, fading behind him as he stepped back out into the Bangkok soup. In this line of work, staying off the grid isn't just about discipline; it's what keeps you breathing. Without a blower to tether him to constant updates, he had to run the hard loop: find a terminal, log in under a burning alias, check the encrypted inbox, wipe the cache, and move before anyone got a proper look at his face.
The neon-drenched streets of Bangkok were a chaotic blur of stalled traffic, street food carts, and glowing signs. Perched on the cracked vinyl bench of a battered, turquoise tuk-tuk, Vic glanced into the side mirror and felt his stomach drop. Tailored right on their rear bumper, weaving aggressively through the congestion, was a sinister-looking black motorcycle.
He was being tailed.
"Chamois! We've got company!" Vic shouted over the frantic, high-pitched buzz of the two-stroke engine.
Chamois, the seasoned Bangkok local behind the handlebars, threw a quick glance in his own mirror, his face a mask of fierce concentration.
"My friend, I lose them!" he yelled back, his knuckles whitening as he twisted the throttle grip. He revved the straining motor to maximum RPM, wrenching the steering handlebars to dive straight into a narrow, pulsing artery of the night market.
Stalls scattered in a storm of flying plastic crates and bruised fruit. Skewers of pork belly and open sacks of dried chillies went airborne as the turquoise tuk-tuk clipped a stray awning, rocking violently on two wheels before slamming back down with a metallic clatter of its thin frame.
Just a few vehicle lengths behind, the black motorcycle surged through the chaos unfazed, chewing up the distance. The passenger on the back slid his feet off the pegs, leaning out into the humid air while levelling a suppressed pistol.
Pop-pop-pop!
Sparks flew as bullets chipped the ground inches from Vic's vehicle, stinging his face with hot debris. One round shattered the rear plastic tail-light housing, showering Vic with a storm of tiny, razor-sharp fragments.
"Hold on tight, mister!" Chamois roared, his foot jamming hard against the floor-mounted brake pedal before dropping the clutch.
He didn't brake for the intersection ahead; instead, he slammed the gear shift down and wrenched the handlebars into a blinding, high-speed drift across a six-lane thoroughfare, the canvas roof snapping violently in the wind.
Tires screeched in a wall of agonising white smoke, drawing a symphony of frantic horn blasts from a pair of trapped tourist buses. The black motorcycle tried to mirror the line, but miscalculated, sideswiping a stationary water delivery truck with a deafening crunch of metal before recovering and locking back onto their tail like a heat-seeking missile.
Up ahead loomed a notoriously tight, blind alleyway—a claustrophobic maze of concrete walls, exposed drainage pipes, and sagging electrical cables.
Chamois grin-aced, eyes wide with adrenaline. He yanked the handlebars hard to the left, diving into the dark concrete gut of the alley at breakneck speed. The sudden manoeuvrer kicked up a thick wall of soot and dust.
Blinded by the sudden plume of exhaust and debris, the chasing motorcycle ploughed blindly into the turn a second too late, its driver losing line-of-sight entirely. By the time they cleared the smoke and burst out onto the opposite side, Somchai's rattling machine was already screaming down a diverging lane leading straight toward the churning expanse of the Chao Wamphray River.
The riverfront appeared suddenly—a massive expanse of dark, churning water rushing beneath the looming shadow of a historic stone bridge. Chamois pulled the throttle back just a fraction, keeping the buzzing engine screaming as he rocketed onto the bridge approach.
"Almost there, mister! Hang on tight!" Chamois yelled over his shoulder, his eyes locked entirely on the road ahead, completely oblivious to what Vic was planning.
Sensing his moment, Vic didn't wait for a slowdown. As the tuk-tuk surged onto the bridge, cutting hard against the stone guardrail, Vic braced his heavy combat boots against the metal floorboard and leapt from the moving vehicle.
For a heart-stopping second, he was suspended against the Bangkok skyline, framed by the amber glow of city lights. Then gravity took over. He plunged downward, slicing cleanly through the humid night air before hitting the fast-running, muddy current of the river below with a heavy, bone-jarring splash.
The impact knocked the wind clean out of him. The foul, murky water rushed into his nose and mouth, stinging his eyes as the fierce undercurrent dragged him under.
Vic forced his limbs to move, fighting his way back toward the surface through the thick, swirling soup of the Chao Rayah. But before his head could break the air, something massive, slick, and heavy coiled violently around his right thigh.
His operator instincts—honed by years of surviving the worst corners of the globe—screamed a red alert.
Through the murky green gloom, a pair of cold, unblinking eyes locked onto his. It was a reticulated python or an enormous monocled cobra that had been swept into the bloated floodwaters—easily twelve feet of pure muscle, thrashing in the panic of the sudden surge.
The snake didn't hesitate. It struck with terrifying speed, its wedge-shaped head darting toward Vic’s chest, razor-sharp fangs baring to the dark water.
Vic didn't panic; he reacted. Ignoring the crushing pressure tightening around his leg, he drove his left hand forward with brutal precision, jamming his thumb hard into the socket of the creature's eye while his right hand locked around behind its jaw, pinning the lethal head inches from his throat.
The snake writhed, a vortex of raw kinetic energy trying to drag him down into the black abyss. Vic used the brute's own momentum against it, wrenching its head hard to the side while kicking his free foot with all the force he had left.
Crack.
A muffled snap echoed underwater. The terrifying grip around his thigh suddenly went slack as the stunned predator lost its purchase, swept away instantly by the surging current into the murky depths.
Vic finally broke the surface, gasping in great, ragged lunges of humid night air, coughing up foul river sludge. He wiped the stinging water from his eyes, treading water as he looked back toward the bridge.
Up above, the red tail light of Somchai's vehicle had already vanished into the distance, swallowed entirely by the neon pulse of the city. Vic let out a sharp, winded breath, checked his leg for venomous punctures, and let the churning river carry him away into the dark.