Robert Kirkman's The Walking Dead: Typhoon

by Chu, Wesley

  Hengyen spied a young woman comforting the others. She appeared to be one of their leaders, or at the very least someone who had her head on straight. He got her attention.

  “What’s your name?”

  The look she gave him was of unabashed hatred. “Meili.”

  “I hope to see you all safely returned to your village one day. I want all of you to survive. To do so, we need to work together. Do you understand?”

  She paused, and then reluctantly nodded.

  “I’m going to depend on you to lead your people. Keep their spirits up and keep them in line, and I’ll do my best to see them well taken care of. If you have any problems, you tell any guard that you need to speak with me.” Hengyen held out his hand. “Do we have an agreement?”

  She stared sullenly and didn’t accept his hand.

  “This typhoon of dead would eventually swallow your village whole. Your only chance at safety is to fight alongside your brothers and sisters at the Beacon,” Hengyen all but pled.

  “Safety? You call this safety?” She gestured out over the chasm swarming with dead. “My people were safe, until you kidnapped us.”

  Much as he tried not to show it, her words had hit on his very real concern that the Beacon was in dire straits.

  Nothing he could do or say would ever make her accept him. It wasn’t necessary. As long as she kept her people in line, that was all that mattered. After this crisis was over, someone like her would be important to help heal the wounds.

  The cable car reached the end of its journey with another loud clatter. Hengyen stepped out and surveyed the area around the platform. It was heavily fortified for no apparent reason. It was manned by ten guards, all positioned facing toward the settlement, not out toward the Charred Fields. He tapped the operator on the shoulder. “Why are so many guards stationed here?”

  “Deserters, Windmaster. Secretary’s orders.”

  Hengyen swallowed his irritation. “Put these men to better use along the fortifications. From this point on, keep the loads to eight per car. I don’t want to stress the motors.”

  He sent Fang off to the infirmary and gave instructions on the care of the newest batch of repatriated citizens. He stepped off the platform and scanned the chaos around him. The parapet was a hive of guards and windrunners mixed with conscripts. Everyone looked exhausted and sleep-deprived. Several injured lay along the walls.

  A shout from the left caught his attention as one of the presumed injured rose up and bit the person next to him in the neck. Several guards swarmed the new jiāngshī, cutting it to bits, but not before it managed to tear the throat out of the woman next to it.

  The two “survivors” were summarily decapitated and tossed over the parapet edge.

  What the hell was going on? Their defenses were a mess! No order, no discipline. Panic and tension were heavy in the air, and it looked like everyone here was on the verge of cracking.

  He stopped a passing guard passing by. “Walk with me.”

  “Yes, Windmaster,” she replied, hastily following him down the catwalk.

  “What happened here? Why are there fires? Did the jiāngshī break through?”

  The guard shook her head. “The jiāngshī overwhelmed perimeter defenses two days ago. We retreated behind the walls, but not without many casualties and injuries. So many died the first night, and…” She pursed her lips.

  Hengyen cursed, feeling déjà vu from the time he had lost the hospital coming back. “I saw us lose a man back there because we’re being careless. Why haven’t we established better procedures for triaging for the wounded?”

  “I’m sorry, Windmaster. Things have been chaotic. We’ve suffered so many casualties that our rotations have had to be cobbled together. Some of our ranks were so devastated that we no longer know who is still alive and who is dead. Not only that, most of our supplies have disappeared and we haven’t heard from anyone in charge in days.” The guard looked as if she were about to break into tears. “My brother is a guard on the east wall. He leads a team of vultures on the first night shift. He says his people haven’t eaten in two days.”

  “When was the last time you slept?” asked Hengyen.

  She shrugged. “I don’t even know what day it is anymore.”

  “Where’s Wangfa?”

  “The defensemaster is leading the fight on the southern wall.”

  They continued through the heart of the settlement toward the administration building. There were signs of battle everywhere. Tents and cabins had collapsed. Garbage was strewn about. Slumped bodies littered the path, many still wearing the blood-stained clothes they had fought in. Others cradled their weapons in their laps. Some looked as if they were simply too exhausted to make it back to their pods or tents and had passed out where they stood. Nobody would know if anyone here was dead until they rose as a jiāngshī.

  There was no order, no direction, no leadership holding the people together. Hengyen should have stayed behind to lead the settlement. Regardless of his role as only the windmaster, he should have held firm. By the time the administration building came into view, Hengyen had worked himself into a silent fury.

  “Get some rest,” he ordered the guard before sending her off.

  Hengyen stepped through the entrance of the administration building and found it nearly empty. Puzzling. He would have thought all the leadership of the settlement would be holed up in here trying to manage the crisis. Instead, he found room after room barren of people.

  No wonder things were falling apart. The body had no head. At the very least Wangfa should have devised a war room to oversee their defenses.

  The door to the secretary’s office was locked for the first time that Hengyen could remember. He raised his knuckles to knock, then decided there wasn’t time for this. Apologizes could be made later, although he felt a sinking dread that they wouldn’t be necessary. Hengyen stepped back and kicked the door open, sending pieces all across the floor.

  He wandered inside slowly, taking in the details. The office was empty, as he had expected, but even more so than the other rooms. Whereas the other offices were empty of people, Guo’s was bereft of a soul. The desk was there, as was the portrait of the Chairman. So was the map and the stacks of handwritten reports, a quarter of which were probably from Hengyen. Gone however were the personal belongings: a framed picture of Guo’s deceased wife, the books on the shelf, even the bottles of alcohol in the cabinet. There was no longer any sign that this office held the seat of leadership of Hunan province.

  Something clicked from above, and then cool air began to tickle the back of his neck. And of course the central air. Even in this desperate time, even with no one here, the damn air conditioning was on.

  Hengyen walked around and sat heavily in the chair. He slammed his fist on the desk. The secretary had abandoned the settlement along with most of the senior leadership. Did they just panic when the typhoon arrived or had this been Guo’s goal all along? No, this must have been planned if he had time to steal all the settlement’s supplies.

  He laced his fingers together, bumping them repeatedly against his forehead. Was the news about the army even true? Did Guo and his fellow conspirators use that lie to keep the settlement together long enough to pull off this theft and cowardly escape? No wonder Guo was so adamant about him personally leading the raid to the village. He needed Hengyen out of the way to pull off this crime. Guo knew he would never go along with their plan and would do everything in his power—including starting a coup—to stop him. For the first time, Hengyen cracked as his resolve and confidence withered. He should have seen this coming. The clues were there. Why had he been such a blind fool?

  Hengyen stared out the dirty window at the gray skies. He could just make out the battle still being waged. Was the Living Revolution just a lie held up by weak men, or was it nothing more than a con perpetrated upon a group of gullible fools? Had any of this ever been real?

  He closed his eyes. “I am the lone monk walking the w
orld with a leaky umbrella.”

  What should he do now? What purpose did he have if everything was a lie? The Red Army was probably broken, the government gone, the country destroyed.

  This was no longer the Land Under Heaven. Heaven had fallen, and with it the people, and that foolish dream of fending off the jiāngshī, of defeating death. The Beacon of Light was not the last hope of a people standing against the darkness. It was a tomb, an island of dirt and mud, waiting for the ravages of the dead to swallow it until the accursed living in this wretched world were finally snuffed out of existence.

  All this time, he had blindly followed and obeyed people he thought wise, noble, patriotic. Now he realized, the rot the Living Revolution faced was more than the rotting flesh of the dead, but also of the corrupted souls of men.

  Hengyen didn’t know how long he sat in silence in Guo’s office, staring out through the smudges of soot and grime on the window, listening to the distant chatters and screams of battle. It must have been hours. The sun was far along its descent by the time the sound of footsteps eventually broke through the low-level noise, loud, sharp slaps of boots on stone. They were followed by a woman’s voice.

  “Windmaster Hengyen, are you here? Windmaster?”

  Hengyen swiveled in the chair and faced the doorway, wondering who was seeking out this fool. A moment later, the guard who had escorted him appeared. Her face was pale, her shirt wet with sweat. She obviously had not heeded his orders to get some rest.

  “Windmaster, thank goodness I found you. You’re needed. The southwestern corner just collapsed.”

  Hengyen grimaced. He was suddenly so tired. A voice in his head wanted to shrug off her words. What was the point of fighting if their fate was inevitable? He nearly told her this much. Then he saw the guard struggling to breathe, fighting to do her duty against these impossible odds. These people needed him to lead them, even if they were all doomed. Especially if they were all doomed.

  “Firstly, do not fear hardship, and secondly, do not fear death,” he muttered, rising to his feet. He spoke louder. “What happened?”

  “The team on the corner was using explosives to set the jiāngshī on fire. One of the injured died and came back as a jiāngshī without anyone else realizing. He bit a guard and a grenade went off in his hands, detonating their entire cache and blowing apart the wall.”

  Hengyen was already striding out of the room before she finished her sentence. “Rally all the reserves. It is time for the People to make our stand!”

  24 THE SIEGE

  Elena had hoped to catch a few hours of sleep after that grueling raid on Fongyuan before she had to join the fight against the typhoon. Unfortunately, the dead and catastrophe waited for no one. The moment she crawled into her cage, the southwestern corner of the Beacon exploded, cratering an entire section of the wall. Elena and just about every other windrunner were summoned to the front line to plug it while groups of enslaved vultures hastily built a second line of fortifications.

  Fortunately, the Beacon’s architects had built another row of containers just behind the outer walls that functioned as backup fortifications as well as housing. The Beacon’s defenders were holding so far, but barely. She had spent well into the night defending the doorway of a half-destroyed container. The bodies littering the ground were so thick the mud flowed red.

  Fourteen hours later, Elena was still waiting to sleep. She was finally pulled away from the front line at dawn. She was essentially asleep on her feet when she tripped and nearly face-planted in the mud on the walk back to her pod. At first she thought her foot had gotten caught on a branch, and then she realized it was an arm. Then she realized the person the arm was attached to was still breathing. Elena was so exhausted she was tempted to just leave them there, but she stayed and waved down a medic.

  She watched as two former vultures picked up the unconscious man—more a boy, really—and moved him onto a stretcher like a slab of meat. One of the medics noticed a tear in the boy’s coat and checked it, uncovering a gash running from beneath his ribs all the way up to his armpit. It didn’t look deep, but it was angry and red. They had to get him to the infirmary quickly—

  Elena gasped when the medic shook his head, pulled out a knife and jammed it into the boy’s temple. She grabbed the medic’s wrist. “What are you doing?”

  He pulled away with a shrug. “Windmaster’s orders. We take no chances with the jiāngshī.”

  She glowered as the two dumped the body off to the side of the path and continued searching for survivors. They stabbed two more injured before disappearing around the corner. She stared at the carnage around her. It felt almost claustrophobic in its oppressiveness. Death had come to the Beacon, and there was no way out.

  Even when Changsha was falling, the people were doing everything in their power to save lives. During the worst of the outbreak, human life still mattered. Now, lives were being discarded on the streets; people who weren’t even seriously injured. The worst part was she had helped make this happen. She had voluntarily captured other people and dragged them to this hell. And for what? To serve as fodder for the jiāngshī and be tossed aside to die on the streets?

  Elena retreated from the side street to a square and saw Hengyen giving orders to several windrunners around him. Eyes narrowing, she set her jaw and stormed up to him. She waited for an opening to speak with him.

  “Windmaster, did you give the order to kill our injured?” The accusation in her voice was blatant.

  He finished rattling off instructions to a guard next to him before turning his attention to her. “The infirmary is reserved for those who can fight the next day. Anyone else is a liability; a potential soldier of the enemy.”

  She gaped. “We’re throwing lives away as if they’re worthless.”

  “In the case of poisonous bite, cut the finger to save the hand; the hand to save the arm; the arm to save the body.”

  “I just saw those medics murder three people!” she screamed. “They could have lived!”

  He looked grim as he leaned in and hissed in her ear. “Elena Anderson, chances are none of us will survive this week. If we don’t prevent the jiāngshī from rising up in the streets and attacking us from behind, none of us will survive this day.”

  Elena felt numb. “I helped bring these people here to get butchered. This is my fault.”

  “It’s not your fault,” he replied. “It is just the way it is.”

  “If you think we’re all going to die, why are we fighting? Why don’t we evacuate?”

  “The Beacon is surrounded. The only way out is through the cable transport that fits ten people at a time. There are still over four thousand souls in the settlement.”

  “Then we start moving ten at a time.”

  “What do you think will happen if word spreads that people are trying to leave? Whatever hold we have on our defenses will collapse, then it’ll be wholesale slaughter. Even if we get all four thousand people out of the Beacon, what happens? That many people will attract every jiāngshī within twenty kilometers. They’ll be slaughtered. At least here we have defenses and shelter.” He shook his head. “Besides, there isn’t enough time or fuel to move everyone. Who lives? Who dies? At least together we have a chance to survive the typhoon. We just need to hold out until the main body passes.”

  “Is the Red Army still coming?” she pressed.

  For the first time, Hengyen’s steely calm cracked. She had never seen the windmaster look tired before. He never showed weakness. “Does it matter, Elena?” His voice was low. “I don’t think anyone is coming for us. We’re on our own. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a settlement to save.” He turned away from her, their conversation ended. “Where are supplies? Has anyone seen the quotamaster? Never mind. I’ll go to the supply tent myself.”

  Elena was left standing alone. She had never felt so lost. She had nothing left to fight for, no family, no hope. In a moment of weakness, she even wished that she had Zhu, the lying bastard. She ret
reated, joining the throng of exhausted and injured people heading to the back line of the settlement while slightly less tired and injured people took their places.

  As she dragged her feet up the red, muddy slope leading back toward her pod, someone caught her attention. It was the woman in Zhu’s camera, the one she had used as a lure to capture Zhu. Elena had avoided her during the journey back to the Beacon. She didn’t want to give the villagers—or her wind team for that matter—the satisfaction of seeing her pain.

  The young woman was hunched over the body of a fallen windrunner. She checked his pulse and grimaced, brushing his opened eyes with her hand. The woman wiped her eyes with her sleeves and put her hands together in a prayer, and then jammed a screwdriver into his skull.

  Elena’s eyes followed her as she moved from body to body. She was gentle, respectful, not unlike the two medics. It made her like the woman even if it infuriated her at the same time. She finally made up her mind and walked to her.

  The young woman saw her approaching and the blood drained from her face. She bowed her head submissively. “Windrunner.”

  Elena held out her hands. “Relax, I just want to talk. How are you being treated?”

  The woman couldn’t hide the hate that flashed on her face. “Do you really want to know?”

  “Never mind. What’s your name?”

  “Meili, Windrunner.”

  “Call me Elena.”

  The woman kept her head bowed. “Is there something you need, Windrunner?”

  “I want to ask you about Chen Wenzhu. When did you guys meet? Was it when he came across your village? Can you tell me about it?”

  Meili frowned. “I don’t understand. I’ve known Wenzhu for a long time. We’re from the same village.”

  A tinge of doubt scratched at the back of Elena’s head. “Were you ‘childhood sweethearts’?” She said the last words in English, not knowing what the Mandarin equivalent was.

  “I don’t know what that means. Our parents wanted to betroth us as children.”