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eBook Category: Science Fiction Hugo Award Nominee
eBook Description: Paolo Bacigalupi recently was nominated for a Hugo Award and won the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award for his short story "The Calorie Man". The author has a website at windupstories.com. He tells us the pitiless future of the "Yellow Card Man" was "an outgrowth from an aborted novel." In his latest story, Tranh, who began existence as one of the book's supporting characters, must use any means available to survive in this ruthless and precarious future.

Originally published in the December 2006 issue of Asmiov's Science Fiction magazine.

eBook Publisher: Fictionwise.com, Published: Asimov's, 2006
Fictionwise Release Date: August 2007

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Available eBook Formats [MultiFormat - What's this?]: eReader (PDB) [59 KB] , ePub (EPUB) [55 KB] , Rocket/REB1100 (RB) [43 KB] , Adobe Acrobat (PDF) [236 KB] , Palm Doc (PDB) [48 KB] , Microsoft Reader (LIT) [96 KB] , Franklin eBookMan (FUB) [116 KB] , hiebook (KML) [126 KB] , Sony Reader (LRF) [71 KB] , iSilo (PDB) [40 KB] , Mobipocket (PRC) [50 KB] , Kindle Compatible (MOBI) [77 KB] , OEBFF Format (IMP) [68 KB]
Words: 14397
Reading time: 41-57 min.
Microsoft Reader (LIT) Format: Printing DISABLED, Read-Aloud ENABLED
Adobe Acrobat (PDF) Format:  Printing DISABLED, Read-Aloud DISABLED
All Other formats: Printing DISABLED, Read-aloud DISABLED

Machetes gleam on the warehouse floor, reflecting a red conflagration of jute and tamarind and kink-springs. They're all around now. The men with their green headbands and their slogans and their wet wet blades. Their calls echo in the warehouse and on the street. Number one son is already gone. Jade Blossom he cannot find, no matter how many times he treadles her phone number. His daughters' faces have been split wide like blister rust durians.

More fires blaze. Black smoke roils around him. He runs through his warehouse offices, past computers with teak cases and iron treadles and past piles of ash where his clerks burned files through the night, obliterating the names of people who aided the Tri-Clipper.

He runs, choking on heat and smoke. In his own gracious office he dashes to the shutters and fumbles with their brass catches. He slams his shoulder against those blue shutters while the warehouse burns and brown-skinned men boil through the door and swing their slick red knives...

Tranh wakes, gasping.

Sharp concrete edges jam against the knuckles of his spine. A salt-slick thigh smothers his face. He shoves away the stranger's leg. Sweat-sheened skin glimmers in the blackness, impressionistic markers for the bodies that shift and shove all around him. They fart and groan and turn, flesh on flesh, bone against bone, the living and the heat-smothered dead all together.

A man coughs. Moist lungs and spittle gust against Tranh's face. His spine and belly stick to the naked sweating flesh of the strangers around him. Claustrophobia rises. He forces it down. Forces himself to lie still, to breathe slowly, deeply, despite the heat. To taste the sweltering darkness with all the paranoia of a survivor's mind. He is awake while others sleep. He is alive while others are long dead. He forces himself to lie still, and listen.

Bicycle bells are ringing. Down below and far away, ten thousand bodies below, a lifetime away, bicycle bells chime. He claws himself out of the mass of tangled humanity, dragging his hemp sack of possessions with him. He is late. Of all the days he could be late, this is the worst possible one. He slings the bag over a bony shoulder and feels his way down the stairs, finding his footing in the cascade of sleeping flesh. He slides his sandals between families, lovers, and crouching hungry ghosts, praying that he will not slip and break an old man's bone. Step, feel, step, feel.

A curse rises from the mass. Bodies shift and roll. He steadies himself on a landing amongst the privileged who lie flat, then wades on. Downward, ever downward, round more turnings of the stair, wading down through the carpet of his countrymen. Step. Feel. Step. Feel. Another turn. A hint of gray light glimmers far below. Fresh air kisses his face, caresses his body. The waterfall of anonymous flesh resolves into individuals, men and women sprawled across one another, pillowed on hard concrete, propped on the slant of the windowless stair. Gray light turns gold. The tinkle of bicycle bells comes louder now, clear like the ring of cibiscosis chimes.