by Chu, Wesley
At first, the government called it a sickness, so Hengyen and his men did everything in their power to neutralize the “sick people” without harming them. That had been their first mistake. It wasn’t until Hengyen witnessed firsthand a child no older than six tear out his mother’s throat and then sink his teeth into one of his soldiers’ arms that he realized what he was truly up against. His soldier died and then rose a few hours later, killing half the men in his hospital ward.
After it became apparent that the dead could not be contained, the Chinese authorities tried to evacuate the city instead of immediately calling for air strikes and decimating the carriers. That had been their second mistake. Containment was impossible. The cities were too heavily populated. The infection spread too easily. Within days, the dead and desperate survivors had overrun most of the quarantine checkpoints in the major population zones. Within weeks, the government had lost contact with every major city in eastern China. Since then, the communication blackout had spread westward, city after city, province after province, until eventually the military had run out of country to defend. Now, Hengyen wasn’t sure how much military was left.
The wind team hurried beneath the bridge and pressed on, careful not to accidentally fall victim to the corpses dropping around them. They hugged one side of the gorge until they reached a shallow path that snaked up the eastern wall. Directly above them was a rock formation that rose a few stories above ground level, which provided a perfect vantage point for the surrounding area all the way to the city of Changde. Hengyen had discovered this particular path and outlook during his many scouting trips. He used to come by himself to track jiāngshī movements from the city, but over the past few weeks the crowds of jiāngshī had grown thicker, and it was simply too dangerous now for anyone to travel alone.
Hengyen ordered everyone but his lieutenant Wangfa to stay at the base of the gorge. The path was so narrow, the only way to cross was to shuffle up laterally with their backs to the stone. Even then, their toes hung out over the side. He had already lost one man to a fall. There was enough death going around. He didn’t want any more lives wasted.
The two men began to move up the path. This was Wangfa’s first time scaling the lookout. Hengyen thought it was important that his second in command became accustomed to it in case anything ever happened to him. Wangfa was the only other surviving member of the Falcon commando unit. The two more often than not didn’t see eye to eye, but he was an able soldier and a competent officer. Hengyen trusted the man enough; whether or not he liked him was irrelevant.
In a previous life, Wangfa hadn’t been command material and was in fact under investigation for excessive use of force and brutality, but the outbreak wiped his slate clean. China had already lost its best and brightest. The survivors had to make do once their ranks were depleted, so Wangfa was given a second chance and summoned back to active duty.
They had nearly climbed out of the gorge onto the same level as the plains when the narrow path ended. The rest of the way was connected by ropes and hooks that Hengyen had set up on a previous trip. Hengyen could hear the buzzing of the jiāngshī wandering around on the other side of the rock formation. Two months ago, the plains on this side of the gorge were all but devoid of jiāngshī. That was no longer the case. Hengyen reached the top first and helped pull Wangfa up. They crawled on their bellies to the edge of the stone formation and stared at the valley below. Wangfa gasped, while Hengyen could only look silently on and exhale slowly through his gritted teeth.
There wasn’t just a mass of jiāngshī down on the plain below. They spanned the entire horizon in every direction. The number of dead were more vast than Hengyen could possibly have imagined. Even worse, they were on the move, funneling down the main road across the bridge.
“There must be hundreds of thousands here. A million,” he whispered, a chill passing through him. For the first time since the early days of the war with the dead, hopelessness twisted his stomach and gripped his heart.
No force could face such an assemblage of dead and hope to survive. This would truly be the end of the Beacon of Light.
In the months since the war with the jiāngshī began, Hengyen had seen and done it all. Every turn had put him up against insurmountable odds and impossible decisions. During the first days of the outbreak, he had risked rescuing a squad of men from Changsha before calling in bombers despite knowing there were still civilians on the ground. He had ordered the death of every injured soldier in a military hospital because jiāngshī had broken through the perimeter and there wasn’t time to evacuate. Hengyen’s commitment and confidence had never wavered. The Living Revolution was all that mattered. He knew what he was fighting for.
“That road leads straight to the Beacon,” said Wangfa in a hushed voice. “This many jiāngshī in one place will smash everything in their way.”
“We have to divert them somehow.”
“How, sir?”
“I don’t know yet, but we’ll find a way. The Beacon and the Living Revolution depend on it.”
A shout from back down in the gorge caught their attention. They scrambled to the other side and saw Linnang waving furiously. One glance farther down the gorge told Hengyen what it was about. Thirty or so jiāngshī were stumbling through the ravine toward his team. If they didn’t get down immediately, the two men could be trapped.
He grabbed the rope and swung his legs over the side. “We have to go now.”
Hengyen repelled down to the path in seconds, but the way across the narrow ledge couldn’t be rushed. He calmly surveyed the wave of the dead rushing past beneath his feet.
The first jiāngshī were felled easily enough, but like everything else about them, it was rarely the first that you had to worry about. Hengyen and Wangfa had only made it halfway down the path when the main body of the cluster reached the beginning of the path. It writhed like a many-limbed demon, groaning and gnashing along the path. His heart swelled at the sight of his wind team battling furiously with their primitive weapons. They didn’t abandon him.
In his haste to rejoin his team, Hengyen lost his footing. He pitched sideways, flipping head first toward the ground. Three of his fingers managed to clutch the ledge, and then he lost his grip, falling two stories to the ground below. It came at him quickly, and he felt a hard crunch on one side of his body. A dull roar filled his ears, and his mind momentarily blanked with pain. The world stuttered, first slowing to a crawl and then speeding to catch up. Wangfa appeared at his side a moment later, pulling him to his feet. Then the roar burst like a bubble, and a cacophony of sounds slammed into him. He gathered his senses and found a battle raging all around him as Wangfa half dragged, half carried him to safety.
Hengyen shucked off his second in command and took charge. “The jiāngshī are clumsy. Use the terrain. Make them come at you.”
He barked several more orders, marshaling his wind team back into a cohesive unit. He pulled Weizhen and Haihong back and called for everyone to gather close. The jiāngshī were hampered by the uneven terrain and the boulders and debris littering the ground. Their numbers were proving a disadvantage as the dead tripped over each other in their hastiness to consume the living. As long as the team stayed calm and followed orders, they should be able to whittle this large group down. In a short time, over half of the jiāngshī were already slain.
Out of the corner of his eye, Hengyen saw Linnang dragging behind, breaking the line. The newest member of the team was shouting incoherently as the jiāngshī surged around him.
“You corpses are nothing! Just bones and rags.” He sank his ax into a skull. “This is for my bà.” He slashed another, ripping its jaw loose. “This is for my dì. This is for my girlfriend, and my scooter. And my university; I got accepted to Fudan two days before the stupid outbreak. I studied two years for the entrance exam!” He continued to rattle off a long list of grievances.
“Linnang,” Hengyen barked. “Pull yourself together. Pull back.”
Li
nnang was so caught up in his bloodlust he didn’t realize that the jiāngshī had surrounded him. He continued to rattle off a long list of grievances as he continued to hack away. Blood and guts soaked his shirt and arms as he swung his weapon in wide, looping arcs. The ax bit into the waist of a jiāngshī, nearly severing it in two. When Linnang tried to pull back, the blade got stuck in bone. He lost his grip on the handle and stumbled backward. He reached for it again.
“Leave it,” yelled Hengyen, plunging his two daggers into the chest of a particularly fat and resilient jiāngshī.
Linnang finally realized his peril. The jiāngshī chasing after them turned and converged on the straggler. He could still have fled, pushed his way through the two or three dead blocking his escape. Instead, however, he panicked and drew his pistol.
“No!” screamed Hengyen. He raced toward the youth, but it was too late. Linnang unloaded his pistol, firing half a dozen times and dropping that many jiāngshī around him. The two men froze as the loud discharge from the gunshot continued to resonate throughout the gorge. Hengyen scanned the top of the ridge above as the lingering sound of the gunshot faded away. Nothing. Not a jiāngshī or even a dust cloud in sight. It appeared they had gotten lucky.
Hengyen rounded on Linnang and snatched the pistol out of his hand. “What did I tell you about discharging your weapon, especially with an army of them nearby?”
Linnang’s hands were shaking. He loosed a nervous chuckle. “I’m sorry, Windmaster. I saw that you were all farther back and panicked.”
Hengyen breathed a sigh of relief and poked him in the head. “Next time use your head. Fortunately, there was no harm this time, but…” His voice trailed off as a low rumble reverberated throughout the gorge, followed by a chorus of thin hisses and groans. The noise began to crescendo.
Something appeared to fall from the sky out of the corner of Hengyen’s eye. He spun toward it and just caught the tail end when a body smashed into the rocks just a few meters from where he stood.
Haihong blanched and pointed toward the ridge line. Lines of jiāngshī appeared on the ledges on both sides of the gorge, attracted by the noise of the firearm. Several more stepped toward them and fell in, tumbling to the rocks below. More jiāngshī followed, except many in the second wave were able to scramble to their feet. The ones that had fallen first cushioned their fall.
Hengyen fought back his natural urge to make this a teaching moment and quickly signaled for an orderly retreat. He began to carve his way back toward the way they had come. The jiāngshī were raining all around them now. Many that crashed to the ground didn’t get back up again. Just as many did, however. The bodies began to pile up at the feet of the steep cliffs.
One jiāngshī whose fall was cushioned by the dozens that fell over the ridge before it tumbled down a slope of bodies and somehow landed on its feet. It didn’t miss a step as it lurched forward, arms outstretched, its neck bent in an unnatural angle. Hengyen was preoccupied barking orders at his team when it barreled into him and grabbed onto his arm.
The windmaster slipped his free hand underneath its elbow into an arm lock and spun it to the ground before burying his dagger into its skull in one smooth motion. Another came at him from his blind side. Hengyen swung his foot out and swept its feet from under it before clamoring to his feet and waving frantically for the rest of his team to retreat.
One jiāngshī got ahold of Linnang, sinking its rotting teeth into his arm before tearing off a bloody chunk. He screamed, batting the decayed creature in the head. A second jiāngshī managed to wrap its blackened hands around his leg. Another grabbed his hair.
Then the feeding frenzy began.
His screams pierced the air as he disappeared under the mass of bodies. Hengyen drew his gun and searched for his fallen man, hoping to get a clear shot to put him out of his misery. All he saw was a mess of flailing limbs and sprays of blood.
He signaled to the others. “Fall back.”
The remaining members of the wind team broke off and fled. Hengyen led the way, careening from side to side as more jiāngshī rained down on them from above. One body nearly fell on Weizhen. Haihong tripped and took a nasty spill when another body landed directly in front of her.
The wind team continued at a full sprint for nearly a kilometer before Hengyen signaled for a stop. He stared back in the direction they had come. The gorge would soon be cluttered with jiāngshī. It would take weeks and manpower they couldn’t spare to clear it if he wanted to use that stone formation as a lookout point again.
“What do we do next, Windmaster?” asked Wangfa.
Hengyen shook his head. In any case, that concern was for a future date. “We head home, double time. Drop all nonessentials. We have to warn the Beacon that a typhoon is coming.”
3 QUOTA
Zhu’s wind team set out the next morning at the crack of dawn. Just as he predicted, the heavy mist of the night before had mostly dispersed by first light. Breakfast had been the remaining hundred-year-old eggs—something Elena hated more than she hated durian. But since they were out of sticky rice, she ate every piece offered to her.
Zhu led them up the stairs to the top floor of the building, and then dropped down from a side window to an adjacent roof. They moved carefully along the edge of the pagoda-style roof, snaking to a corner and then climbing on all fours up to the roof’s center ridge. The going was slow and treacherous, the tiles slippery from the previous night’s mist.
“Blow through as if you were never here,” he muttered, carefully watching his footing. It was a common wind-team saying hammered into them during training.
As they moved deeper into the village, the streets below were increasingly filled with jiāngshī. Almost all of them stood perfectly still, completely undisturbed, as if they were part of the Terracotta Army. It brought Zhu back to his restless thoughts last night: Do jiāngshī sleep? Do they dream? Regardless, it was important they remained undisturbed, because agitation was infectious. The last thing the wind team needed was to get distracted by a sea of agitated jiāngshī. A swoop of low-flying cranes were passing by overhead when Zhu heard a squawk behind him, and saw Elena sliding down the steep roof feet first as her hands pawed against the tiles. He dove after her, but even as his body skidded down the rough tiles, he knew he wasn’t going to make it. Then, to his surprise, Elena managed to stop her descent, and he found himself skidding past her. The edge of the roof was coming at him quickly. He visualized plummeting headfirst into a sea of jiāngshī, and then his slide came to a sudden stop.
He looked back and saw her stretched out, gripping a handhold with her left hand and a fistful of his pants with her right. How she had managed to save them both was beyond him. Zhu cautiously picked himself up and crawled to her on all fours. They climbed back up to the ridge of the roof together. Bo helped them to their feet.
Zhu grasped her arm tightly. “Good save.”
She held up her fingers and wiggled them. “At least those years of mountain climbing in the Guadalupes count for something.”
He checked her tennis shoes, which were worn down almost to the insoles. “We need to get you a new pair of shoes,” he muttered.
“Size six, please. Pink, preferably.”
He chuckled. “I’ll see what I can—” Zhu stopped abruptly and turned toward the horizon. For a second, he thought he saw movement on the top floor of the building on the other side of the street. He scanned the rooftops, but detected nothing further.
Bo followed his gaze. “What is it?”
Elena, squinting, reached for her bow.
Zhu scanned the roof for several more seconds before letting it go. “It’s nothing. I thought I saw someone. Stay alert.”
The team moved deeper into the village with increasing caution. They continued to the end of the block to a defunct power line stretching across the street. Zhu went first to make sure it would hold his weight. Wrapping his arms and legs around the cable, he hung upside down and shimmied across, avoiding l
ooking down at the river of dead below. The number of jiāngshī on the ground near the center of the village was so thick, the ground was no longer visible. Nearly at the other side, he made the mistake of looking down to find his footing only to come face-to-face with the mass of roiling jiāngshī, their fingers contorted into claws reaching for him.
The jiāngshī had finally noticed them, and the sheer madness of their feral rage made him limp. His mind reeled. Zhu had managed to wall off his emotions after the outbreak. It was the only way to survive the horrors of this reality. He made himself believe that the jiāngshī weren’t dead people risen. No, they were just creatures that needed to be avoided or killed. He had to be strong to take care of Elena. But after what he discovered last night at his grandparents’ home… he squeezed his eyes shut. He sucked in several shallow, quick breaths as his body trembled.
Zhu didn’t know how long he hung on the cable, just that suddenly something stabbed him from behind, not hard enough to break flesh, but certainly enough that he let out a shocked howl. He looked down the wire and saw Elena behind him. She had her legs crossed over the wire and was holding on by one hand. In her other hand was her short spear.
His surroundings ebbed back into his consciousness. His arms suddenly burned, and blood rushed into his head. “I’m all right,” he shouted as he made his way to the other side. He dropped to the roof carefully and then caught Elena as she fell into his arms. He held her even tighter than he had held the rope.
“Thank you for coming for me,” he whispered in her ear.
“Don’t scare me like that, asshole.” Her voice trembled. “You were just hanging there for a whole minute. What were you doing?”
They were still embracing when Bo made it across. The big man tapped both their shoulders. “I have no one to hug.” Elena made her cooing sound and moved as if to pull him in as well. Bo held his hands up. “No, that’s not what I meant. I just want to go.”
