Lethal Circuit

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Chungking Mansions. Even the name sounded decrepit. Twenty-seven stories of decaying concrete apartment block that made the worst housing project in America look like the Hilton. The truth was, Chungking Mansions wasn’t so much a residence as a third world city stuffed into a condemned building occupying some of the most valuable real estate on the planet. Why it still stood was a bureaucratic mystery, but the prevailing theory was that it had taken the place of the old Kowloon Walled City which had been razed years previously.

The old Walled City had been a historical anomaly: an unclaimed property lying in the no man’s land between Chinese and British jurisdiction that had grown into a tangled web of vice and commerce the likes of which the world had never seen. There was no law. There was no order. There was only humanity run amok in a group of structures that had slowly but steadily grown into one another until they became one and the same: six and a half acres of madness, fourteen stories high.  The old Walled City had finally met the wrecking ball, but its displaced residents had needed some place to go and that place was Chungking. In a word, Chungking was hell, Hong Kong style. It was also home to some of the finest South Indian curry on the Pacific Rim. It was this curry and the ice cold beer that accompanied it that added up to the long trough style urinal Michael Chase now stood before.

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