by Chu, Wesley
For a second, he considered turning around and going back for Bo and Elena, but a glance over his shoulder told him the jiāngshī were riled up and converging on his position, drawn by the noise and smoke. From buildings and alleys they emerged, shambling toward him with familiar groans and snarls. There was no way he could sneak his way back into the village. If anything, the best thing he could do for his wind team was lead the ones chasing after him as far away as possible. He gave the lumbering vehicle more gas and it rumbled forward.
Zhu had almost reached the outskirts of the village when he came upon a crowd of jiāngshī clustered near the main road and adjacent to a field leading out of the village. He turned sharply right, nearly tipping the truck over as it plowed through the tall grass and the dead. The cabin shook as bodies bounced off the truck.
It came to a stop in a rice field, dipping down abruptly into the mud, nearly causing Zhu to fly through the windshield. He slammed against the glass and bounced violently backward, his head snapping against the headrest. The world swayed and he saw triple of everything.
He blinked several times to fight off the dizziness. “A seatbelt would have been smart,” he grumbled. He looked out the driver’s side window and saw a jiāngshī wearing a conical hat and plain shirt lurching across the mud toward him.
Zhu was in no condition to fight. He scrambled to the passenger side and threw the door open. He stood a little too fast. The world was still spinning as he stepped out of the truck, and he pitched face-first into the mud. The freezing water bit into his face as he was momentarily submerged. It woke him from his daze, and he pushed himself onto all fours. He checked his duffel and looked around for an escape. Forcing himself up to his knees, Zhu tested his balance. He was still groggy, but everything was beginning to sway slightly less. He wiped the mud off his face and stopped.
Standing close by were two figures, both dressed in heavy country clothing. At first he thought they were jiāngshī. He reached for his machete, then stopped when one of them pulled out a club.
Zhu threw up his hands. “Wait,” he pleaded, his words muffled from a mouthful of mud. “Who are you? I need help—”
But Zhu never finished the sentence, as one of the figures walked up and brought the club down across his temple.
4 STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND
Elena fought Bo for as long as she could. She punched and clawed and slapped, but Bo was a rock, quietly insistent as he dragged her away from the broken skylight. When she nearly squirmed out of his arms, he just picked her up like a sack of rice, switched shoulders, and carried on.
“Put me down. We have to go back for him, asshole! Let me go, húndàn.” Asshole and húndàn were repetitive, but that was how she’d first learned Mandarin. “We can’t abandon him.” She cursed a string of expletives in a mixture of Mandarin and English.
He finally put her down, but kept a fistful of her coat in his grasp. “He’s gone, Elena. If you go back, you’ll be gone as well.”
Tears welled in her eyes. She held them back. Elena hadn’t cried since the first month of the outbreak, when all she had done was cry. She had promised herself that she was done feeling sorry for herself, that crying didn’t do anyone any good, and that the next time she cried, it would be tears of happiness when she saw her family again.
She drew in a deep breath and muttered. “I’m fine now.”
Bo didn’t let her go. “You promise you won’t try to run back?”
She shook her head, muttering under her breath. “I promise, asshole.”
“You promise you won’t hit me again?”
She stared at the angry lines cutting across his cheek. “I’m sorry about your face.”
He shrugged and let her go. He looked thoughtful. “What’s an ‘asshole’?”
Elena replied with a straight face. “It means ‘good friend.’ ”
He nodded. “I am a very good ‘asshole’ then.”
She sat at the edge of a roof and looked back the way they had come. She slapped Bo’s hand away when it hovered near her coat again.
Bo knelt in front of her and clutched her arms with his large hands. He became serious, the usual jolly slow-talking doofus replaced now by someone thoughtful and sober. “Listen, xiăomèi, I had a big family in Liaoning: wife, children, brothers and sisters, uncles and aunts, and more nephews and nieces than I could count. When the province fell, half of them died the first week. The other half died trying to rescue those who could no longer be rescued.” He shook her gently. “Zhu’s gone. The best thing we can do is to keep on living in his honor.”
“What if he manages to escape?”
“Then he’ll find his way back to us. To you.”
“But—”
A loud screech shattered the air, followed by a thunderous crack from the direction of the garage. Elena exchanged startled looks with Bo, and the two scampered back the way they had come just in time to see the delivery truck turn the corner and speed away down the street. She flinched as it plowed over jiāngshī like bowling pins and plowed into the wall of a building.
She tugged Bo’s sleeve. “Come on.”
* * *
It wasn’t hard to track Zhu. All they had to do was follow the wreckage and the tracks. They made their way along the roofs until they ran out of buildings, and then continued down the length of a brick wall that reached the edge of the village. She spied the truck in the distance, tilted forward in a rice field.
Finding the truck was the easy part, but getting to it proved far more difficult. The rice paddy they had to cross was littered with dozens of jiāngshī. It was an open field with no cover to hide in and nowhere for them to climb up to or crawl below. This made the several-hundred-meter trek extremely dangerous. At least at first.
Elena and Bo quickly discovered that this particular rice field was a sunken depression where water pooled in a basin. The water came up to her knees, making it a difficult slog to cross, but it was even worse for the dead. As hard as it was for them to walk across it, the jiāngshī almost seemed stuck in place. It made steering clear of the jiāngshī here relatively easy, although one thing they still had to watch out for were the jiāngshī they couldn’t see, the ones completely submerged in the water. It took them an hour to weave their way to the truck with Elena continually prodding the ground ahead of her with her short spear.
It was late in the morning by the time they reached the truck. It had taken them much longer than they had hoped. As soon as they reached the dry part of the field, Elena broke into a sprint. She noticed a jiāngshī stuck in the mud close to the truck futilely walking in place. It faced them with an angry moan, attempted to change directions, and promptly fell flat on its face. She brought the business end of her spear down on its neck as they walked past.
Elena’s hopes fell away when Bo swung open the driver’s door to find the cabin empty. They found fresh blood on the windshield and seats. Elena circled the truck, cursing at the ankle-deep water. If it had been just a little less, they could have tracked Zhu’s footprints.
“At least he’s alive,” said Bo, looking underneath the truck. “That’s something.”
Elena bit back her disappointment. Yes, it was something. Certainly better than finding a corpse, or worse, Zhu as a jiāngshī. The thought of having to put him down sent chills through her body. He was alive, and that meant everything. He might not even be that badly hurt if he walked away from the accident.
“His duffel is gone,” she said.
“Good! He’s probably heading back to the Beacon at this very moment.”
Elena brightened. That made perfect sense. It had taken them over two hours to reach this field from the garage. Why would Zhu have stuck around? The two of them had moved carefully through the village to circumvent the jiāngshī. What reason did Zhu have to expect them to find him? She would be making her way back home too if she were in his shoes.
Elena looked east toward the horizon. “He’ll be following the flags. If we hurry, we
can catch up.”
Bo looked up at the main concentration of light behind the thick rolling clouds. “It looks like rain again, and the day is half over. Maybe we should hide in the cab until it passes. We can head back first thing in the morning.”
Elena shook her head. “No, we leave now. It’s still early enough. We can make it to the sanctuary by tonight.”
She left no room for objections. Elena knew she was being a little rash, but Zhu wasn’t around to disagree, and Bo wasn’t exactly the type to argue. She also didn’t like the idea of leaving Zhu on his own, no matter how skilled someone was at surviving in the countryside.
They set off for the Beacon immediately. Elena led them out of the rice field and down into a narrow ravine that ran alongside the lone paved road leading out of the village. The trip directly back to the Beacon normally took three days, depending on the weather, but she hoped to make it back by the following evening if they pushed hard. Part of it was because she harbored the hope of catching up to Zhu, but also because they were now one pack down and still had to carry the scavenged supplies home. To make room, they kept just enough food and water for one day’s worth of travel.
They used the roads as a guide but also made sure to only follow them from afar. Nearly every single stretch of highway, road, and trail connecting the population centers was cluttered with bumper-to-bumper traffic jams of abandoned cars and wagons. Inside many of the vehicles and immediately surrounding them were jiāngshī who filled up the rest of the roads and spilled out along both sides.
Elena and Bo kept a good fifty-meter distance safely away from the roads, only moving closer if they had to cross it, usually by finding a cable line that passed over the road or through the sewer tunnels that passed underneath. That was why it had taken their wind team so long to make it to Fongyuan after they left the flag paths. It would sometimes take an entire day to cross a road safely in an uncharted area. Fortunately, all the hard work had been done on the initial journey here, and the two simply had to backtrack the way they came following the flags they had planted previously.
The two broke away from the road and waded through a water-logged field just as the sun was beginning its descent across the sky. The grasses here grew above Elena’s head, so she could only see as far as the end of her short spear. It was times like this when she wished she had a real weapon instead of a sharpened broomstick. Zhu had offered to buy her a long knife with some of their points, but Elena valued food and clothing more than a better way of killing the dead. She also wasn’t comfortable fighting up close, preferring the range capabilities of her bow and arrows.
It would have been easy for them to get lost, since Zhu usually led the way. Fortunately, they found the first yellow flag dangling from a branch well before they began to lose light. They would have been in serious trouble if they had missed it before dark.
There were dozens of wind teams operating out of the Beacon, continuously working to keep the camp running and the people fed. In the few months since they had started scavenging, the teams had created a system of tying yellow flags to frequently traveled paths to help map the region around the Beacon. It helped cut down on deaths and made it much easier to expand further out on runs.
They followed the flags through the marsh, navigating a maze of reed flowers and clumps of damp earth. The breeze overhead caused the water to ripple and the grass to sway. Sounds of wildlife came alive all around as dusk approached. Elena began to lose focus. A person could stay alert for only so long. She was slightly comforted by the fact that the marked paths had been cleared of jiāngshī many times, because it also meant they were getting close to home.
Bo tapped her on the shoulder and pointed to a jiāngshī hopelessly trapped within the tall weeds. The poor thing was so waterlogged, its gray bloated body was practically sagging off its bones. Elena aimed her spear and gave it a quick poke. The sharp point entered through its eye, piercing its head like an overripe melon.
The yellow flags led them out of the marsh and over a craggy hill down the side of a cliff, circumventing several known clusters of jiāngshī. Elena and Bo reached the end of the rocky hills, crossing a long rope bridge to a thick forest in the valley below. The din of moaning dead flitted up through the foliage. They climbed one of the giant ancient trees and continued moving from tree to tree using a system of ropes connecting the branches. Jiāngshī from the neighboring village of Duogai had spilled into these woods. Combined with the thick foliage, the ground below was impossible to clear, so Hengyen, the leader of all the wind teams, had devised a different strategy for crossing the forest. It had taken half of the wind teams and most of the surviving military garrison two weeks to plan, cut, and construct the sky bridge. Casualties were high, but it enabled the wind teams to scavenge westward, which was crucial, since it was practically impossible to travel east toward all the large cities.
After some miles had passed beneath their feet, Elena paused and stared at the horizon as she and Bo stepped out of a sewer pipe that ran under the main highway. The fading sunlight on the mist blanketing the green mountains in the distance was breathtaking. It was moments like this that made her heart skip, and she would momentarily forget about the tragedies that surrounded her. China was once again this magical place she had first fallen in love with during a class on Chinese mythology.
Hunan was considered one of the most beautiful provinces with its lush primeval forests, towering mountains, and many meandering rivers. It also held a particularly important place in Chinese history. This region was the backdrop of many legends of tragic heroes, mystical creatures, and celestial beings, as well as the famous Dragon Boat festival. It was the birthplace of the philosopher Wang Fuzhi, the artist Qi Baishi, and the founder of the People’s Republic of China, Mao Zedong.
China was the most perfect place in the world for Elena to spend her gap year before starting law school at the University of Texas. She had had big plans of becoming fluent in Mandarin and working in international business in Asia. All her dreams were dashed now, or, at best, put on hold. Elena wasn’t sure if this was the end of the world, but it sure felt like it. Her place should have been by her family’s side, but she ended up being halfway across the world, far from her loved ones and everything she knew.
She wondered again how her parents back at home were dealing with all this. Elena had not heard any news from the States since the first days of the outbreak. She had managed to get ahold of her mom when reports of the outbreak first came on the news. Her mom didn’t think anything of it, and assured Elena that the entire family was safe and symptom-free.
“We can’t wait for you to come home,” was the last thing her mom had said to her. “We miss you so much, darling.”
That was the final time Elena heard from her family. The phone lines and Internet went down shortly after, as did all contact with the outside world. If things back home were anything like what was happening here in China, she feared the worst.
She hated the feeling of being completely helpless. As long as there was an ocean between her and her family, there was nothing she could do to help them or to even find out what fates befell them. For her, that was the absolute most painful part of this ordeal: the not knowing.
“Think positively, girl,” she muttered. Her folks probably skipped town at the first sign of trouble and were waiting out the outbreak at the family cabin in Santa Fe, or at worst they were holed up at her uncle Braff’s ranch in Marble Falls. Who knows, maybe the United States was able to get it quickly under control and was already working on a cure. No matter what, she was intent on getting home one way or another. She just had to survive a little longer until rescue arrived, or she found her own way home.
Elena and Bo reached the tiny village of Duogai by sunset, racing ahead as the last sliver of orange rays disappeared over the horizon. Duogai had once been a vibrant fishing village, unique in that half of its buildings sat directly over the waters of a small lake. Now, the streets leading into the villag
e, as everywhere else, were filled with lanes of abandoned cars and packed with jiāngshī in between.
Elena stayed true to her wind-team training. If she and Bo had arrived even twenty minutes later, they probably would have opted to sleep in the trees. They were cutting it close. They followed the yellow flags wide of the road to a shed behind a row of buildings, and climbed up a dumpster onto the shed’s roof, then across a row of buildings that continued out onto the lake.
Light from the departed sun bathed the landscape in angry rust. In a few minutes, it would be dark and too dangerous to walk on these uneven, slanted roofs with pipes and broken tiles waiting to trip them. One slip and fall into the green murky waters was certain death. The wind teams had learned from a few of the survivors of Duogai that nearly half of the village had loaded themselves onto boats in the early days of the outbreak in the hopes of waiting it out. Inevitably, death reached them as well, and now half of the village stood at the bottom of this shallow lake. Anyone who fell in would instantly be pulled down to join them.
Elena and Bo reached the second-to-last building nearly a quarter of the way into the lake a few minutes after night had curtained. She went first, lowering herself from the roof to the balcony and then entering into the living room. This was one of the more secure rest stops the wind teams used. Surrounded by water on all sides, they were safe from any crowds of jiāngshī passing through. The windows and doors were barred, giving them the rare place outside of the Beacon where they did not have to constantly look over their shoulders. Desperate survivors were just as great of a threat as the living dead. In fact, owing to the fickleness of human nature, they were often worse.
She did a quick search of the two rooms and returned a little crestfallen. No small part of her had convinced herself that she and Bo were going to drop in here and find Zhu already next to a blazing fire, half-drunk from a bottle of plum wine that he had found somewhere. Just in case, she checked the walls carefully for any markings or drawings of a pig. During the early days of the outbreak, before the two of them reached the Beacon, they created a way to communicate with each other. Zhu’s zodiac was a pig, Elena’s a horse. If one ever needed to give the other a message, they would draw it on the walls. There were no pigs, so Elena scratched out a rough image of a horse with her small utility knife.
