Bangkok Filth by Ken Austin

Author:Ken Austin
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Travel, Bangkok, Stories, Travellers, Thailand, Tales, Expats
ISBN: 9786167707020
Publisher: Ken Austin
Published: 2012-05-18T04:00:00+00:00

The Transit Strike

It’s easy for an expat to get in the habit of criticizing everything about Thailand. It sometimes takes a temporary return to his country of birth to realize how good he has it in his second home. A litany of annoyances can intrude on your daily life in Thailand, but a public sector transit strike that partially shuts down an entire city is not one of them.

Andy sat on the bus and stared straight ahead. It was strange to be back on the bus after six months of a brutal transit strike. He considered how unreal it was as people silently shuffled onto the bus without any harsh words to the smug, sneering individual behind the wheel. The drivers had gotten what they wanted and wreaked devastation on thousands of lives. Many of them were high school drop-outs and were simply allowed to hold people hostage for months on end. Yet here they were, the people damaged and beaten down and without the guts to even say anything.

The driver looked to be about 45 years old with long straggly hair and a few faded tattoos visible on his arms. Andy thought he smelled the reek of alcohol on the driver’s breath as he stepped on the bus.

The driver stared ahead and marveled at what a gutless and easily manipulated city he lived in. The drivers had held out and got what they wanted, and then some. Sure they had lost money during the months they were out but they had made up for it in other ways. The driver had known many friends who had sold drugs during the strike, making a tidy profit while taking a sick satisfaction in the misery that people were suffering through.

He barely acknowledged the sad fools getting on the bus though he had to admit they were useful idiots in providing him with the potential to rake in excess of one hundred thousand dollars a year. It was so simple to play the system that he could hardly believe it. He briefly noticed a man wearing a ski mask in the handful of people still getting on. Strange he thought, hardly cold enough for that.

Now he was being manhandled and ripped out into the cold air and vaguely noticed that it was the man with the ski mask. It was one fluid brutal motion and he was face down in the cold slush of the street, inches from the tire of the bus, an oppressive and overwhelming pressure being applied to his neck. He was blacking out quickly.

The man with the mask drove his foot down on the driver’s neck with all his might while pushing up on an immovable rod that supported the side-view mirror of the bus. The spindly tattooed arms of the driver thrashed in the snow, the sneering look long gone and replaced with a pop-eyed horror at the realization that his life was ending. No sounds escaped through his bent, yellowed teeth as the thousands of pounds of pressure mashed his windpipe to the concrete.

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