“Hey, new boy!”
Ax had been warned about this. The testing. The games they would play with him.
The advice had been, take it seriously, and deal with it.
Ax was not scared. He had grown up with bad men. These here were boys, not men. The biggest waddled up to Ax. Ax could smell the sweat coming off of him. His face looked like cakes. Lots of icing sugar. Creamy and sweet. No danger here. “Hey, new boy, lick my boots!” His arms hung from his sides like the picture of total dumb. His smile looked like an elephant with dental problems.
No messing about, then, thought Ax, straight in. He looked down and laughed to himself. Mouth closed. And then he said, very clearly, looking up and right in the big guy’s eyes: “Go fuck your mother and your sister, but, you won’t feel a thing, cos I just fucked them, dickhead.”
The big guy just looked, stared at Ax. What the fuck?
“You what?” he said. His face was all scrunched up like a pancake gone wrong on the heat.
“You heard me, go fuck yourself. I just fucked your mother and your sister, so no point in you trying again.”
The big guy shook his head, looked around, and then made his move. A stupid thing to do, and a stupid move. Ax had already checked the guy and his mate as he’d moved in. He knew exactly what to do. It was what he did. And he did it better than anyone.
People still talked about that day. They had never seen anything like it. There was no time to call a halt to the violence. It was all over too soon. Four, really, really hard men, broken now, on the floor.
Ax spat on the biggest as he walked past. “I told you, go fuck yourself.”
He walked, then. Out of the violent space and into the history books of Rainbow. The army had hired him. And he had passed all the tests. Rainbow still talked about his tests. Still talked about that day. The day hell came to earth. That is the day they named him “The Rainbow Man.”
The hardest part of the training came in the first three parts. Everyone was scared of it. They called it the path of the Phoenix. Perhaps because a lot of them died, before being reborn, or staying dead. Sometimes they “died a death”. Other times they actually died. This is why everyone had to sign a waver before going into the room. Accepting full responsibility for anything that happened in the room, including their own death. It was government crap and everyone knew it, but still, they all signed, they all believed.
The first part was purely a test. You were locked in a room with a bunch of guys. It depended how “good” you were, how many guys there were if you got out in one piece or many.
Ax remembered it well.
“This is where you learn fear,” said the old man. His name was Joe. They called him “the old man” although he was not old. Some said he was sixty. Some said slightly older. But only when he was not around to hear them talk. Maybe it was the look in his eyes. “In you go. Come out in one piece.“ He gave Ax a slap on the back, a farewell.
And Ax walked into the room. The door locked behind him. There were ten hard men in that room. They were all smiling. Stupid smiles. Confidence. Nobody moved. Then a voice came over a loudspeaker. “Gentlemen, teach this little prick what it means to hurt.” The men, all of them, had put masks on their heads, then. Nobody would know who had killed the prick. All video cameras were automatically shut off. Except one.
They had come at him then, but the result was not the the way it was supposed to go. Something was wrong, very, very wrong. Ax had hurt them. All of them. This was not supposed to happen. They had come, masked, some with fear. Ax had waited, in calmness. He had seen, felt and smelled them coming. Smelled the fear on some of them. Smelled the violence in others. He had relaxed totally, and reacted. That is all. But he had reacted with a violence unseen before in Rainbow. They had fallen like berries from a tree. It was as if Ax had reached out into the bush , grabbed the main branch, ripped and pulled and shaken it until all the berries were on the ground, fallen on the ground to be stood upon. Crushed. Bleeding juice on the dry earth. At the end Ax just stood there. Listening to them wanting to die. He could feel the people in the control box high above. He could smell them. If the damaged men at his feet were the berries then these others, them up there, they were the branch. Ax just waited. He was in death mode. They left him alone.
That is why the second part was so much worse for Ax.
The second part. Ax did not know, yet. But his second part would be all the worse because of his first part. It would be the same masks. This time, worn from the beginning.
Again Ax had entered a room. There was only one other person there. His mentor, Joe, the old man.
“Ax, “ he said, his tone serious.
“There is only one way you are going to get through this. Just accept. Everything. Don’t try to fight it. You can’t. Just take it. It will end. That is all you need to know.”
Then, he had tied Ax between two vertical beams. Legs and arms wide apart. Ax had allowed him to do it. He had known it had to be this way. He also knew that no matter what they did he would survive.
He could not move. Four guys had entered the room then. Wearing black masks. The masks totally covered their faces. No way to know who they were.
Then they had started on him. Slowly. One at a time. Staying fit. Punches, kicks. Punches to the kidneys, kicks to the balls. After 2 minutes his nose was broken and he was bleeding from his lips. He guessed his testicles must be the size of tennis balls. Everything hurt. He thought. And then.
Then they started with the metal bars. On his arms. On his shins. On his head. On his teeth. His balls. His ears. His toes. His feet. His ass. They worked him over real good. With knowledge. They hurt him. They were not going to kill him. Ax had never known such pain. There was nothing he could do. And so, he had trusted his mentor, Joe, and he had let go. Had let his body go. He had entered the world of his mind. And he had felt no more pain. They were hammering a shell. An empty shell. They would not kill him.
Three hours later he passed out when a massive strike hit his temple at the same time as an iron bar was rammed up his ass.
He came back into this world when they threw a pail of ice cold water on him. He was lying on a floor somewhere. Everything hurt. And even in that moment, or perhaps because of it, he had understood. He felt pain where his consciousness went. If he focused on his knees it was his knees that hurt. If he focused on his hands, it was his hands. If he focused on his head it was his head that hurt the most. So, he realized. Focus on nothing? He cracked open his blood-filled eyes and looked around. It looked like a prison, he thought. It seemed to him as if a doctor was there, hovering, bending over him. He felt his eyelids being lifted up, then an injection, then nothing.
He woke up for real four days later. Bruised beyond recognition. Hurting everywhere.
The old man was there. Ax thought he must be in a hospital.
“You did well, mate. You did well,“ said the old man. “You are alive.” Joe patted Ax on the hand, then stood up and left. Ax gathered himself. He felt the energy around him, in the room, in the air, sucked it in and ordered his body to heal and to heal quickly. His body did heal, and heal quickly. Everyone was amazed. Except Ax. This is what he did. He had always had this talent. To tell his body what to do, and it did it.
Seven weeks later he was in the canteen when Joe walked up again. “You are on, now, round three.” Ax just looked. “Last round, final test. Get through this and you are free. Get through this, then get your teeth fixed, then you are free, finished here.“ Joe patted Ax’s shoulder and walked off. “Rainbow!” shouted a voice. “Training room seven, now.” There was a slight hush in the room, everyone knew what it was, room seven, so slowly they began to talk again, talking, about anything, to fill that space. Nobody looked at Ax, but everyone could see him. Ax left.
He walked round the building until he came to room seven. He walked in without knocking. Again the door closed behind him. Joe was there. A voice came over the loudspeaker into the room. It was a deep voice. English accent. Powerful voice. A leader.
“The first test, was to let you see what you can do. The second test, was to show you how much you can take, how much you can suffer, and still come back, as you are now, nearly perfectly healed. This final test is to see what you do when you know that you will heal. When you have no more fear of being hurt. Test two should have taken that fear. This final test will show us if we are right. “
A door in the wall opened and the guys walked in. Some of them, by their build and the way they walked, were the same guys as last time. OK, guys with a grudge. But this time they all had something in their hands. Baseball bats. Knuckle dusters. Knives, Ax noticed. So, so, he thought. The final test. They were going to kill him this time. Well. He smiled, then, as he thought, that it did not matter. In that moment he knew, there was nothing they could do to him. No way they could stop him. He did not think. Did not wait for instruction. Did not wait for an order to begin.
He just started walking. Towards the ten guys. They ran at him. They came. And Ax went through them like a hot knife through butter. They were painfully slow and he mowed them down as a giant would a child.
Up above, in the control room, the Rainbow group were watching. “Gentlemen. Now you know why we call this one “The Rainbow Man.”
“He is our most perfect weapon. He shall earn us a lot of money. We will send him to Zha for final preparation. Orchid Island will make or break what we could not. This one, will be made“
And at exactly that moment the iron bar that Ax had launched smashed against the control room glass, bouncing off to clatter a few seconds later on the stone floor beneath. Ax looked up as Rainbow looked down. “Gentlemen, what have we here?” asked Ethan Harrington, smiling.
“Ax, you’ve been chosen. They’re sending you to Zha.”
“Which is what, where? Who?” said Ax?
“I don’t know,” said Joe, “I only know this: when you leave for Zha you don’t come back. Only the very best are ever chosen, so if they are going to kill you, it will not be right away. The rest? I honestly don’t know.”
“Well, I guess I’ll find out,” said Ax. He knew Joe was lying. He did not mind. He would have to lie. Lie or be killed, probably.
They had taken a long-haul flight from Zurich, landing briefly at Narita International Airport in Tokyo before flying on to Taipei. It is a fact not very well known that Taiwan is inhabited only on it’s eastern side, the side facing China. It is an island split in two, more or less exactly down the middle. The western side is nearly totally uninhabited. Wild and mountainous it was home to several Buddhist monasteries hiding from the official Chinese government. This is partly why mainland China hated the Taiwanese. The whole island was a den of subversives.
“Ax was tired when they arrived at Taoyuan International Airport in Taipei. He looked at the writing on the wall. “We are in China?” he asked? He thought of Cookie.
“All your questions will soon be answered. First we must catch a plane.” Ax shook his head. This was becoming a real pain in the ass, he thought.
Thirty minutes later they had passed through customs, a parting of the passenger waters, like a gun-wielding Moses, as if by magic not being stopped and thoroughly searched like all the others. A brief phone-call later and they were again standing on an airfield. This time looking at a small four seater propeller plane. “Do you like Orchids?” smiled his watchdog. Ax had named him watchdog on the trip. He was always there. Watching. Smelling. Guarding. “Orchids? Why?”
“We are going to Orchid Island.“