by Chu, Wesley
Meili began to sprint up the hill toward the rest of their people. Elena was following close behind, and Zhu was doing his best at the rear. His leg was dragging, and he could feel the numbness radiating up from it. Finally, the pain became too much. He fell to a knee and grasped his foot.
“Elena!” he nearly shrieked.
She turned and grabbed his other hand to pull him in close. “Are you hurt?”
Zhu shook his head, and then hissed when a fresh surge of pain shot up his thigh. He glanced down and clutched his leg, wiping away the dried mud and blood smeared all over his skin.
There, on the side of his ankle, was a deep, angry bite mark.
28 THE STORM PASSES
Wangfa wiped the sweat off his face with a dirty cloth as he split cords of wood at the small clearing in front of the grain silo. He had always thought the settlement a disgusting dump, but he never realized how good he had had it until it was gone. He swung the ax again, chopping another log down the middle. He missed being someone important, or at least having someone else do all these menial chores. He was the defensemaster of the Beacon of Light, after all.
At least he used to be. Wangfa had returned to the Beacon three weeks after he fled, roughly a week or so after the typhoon had passed. Everything was as he had expected. There was nothing left but the bare ruins of what had once been a large settlement. Most of the perimeter walls were intact, but little else. There were jiāngshī everywhere, more than he had ever seen in his life, save for when they had first discovered the typhoon from Hengyen’s lookout. It appeared many of the jiāngshī who had broken through the Beacon’s defenses had decided to stay, or more likely hadn’t known how to get out. Many of those who were still behind the walls were the settlement’s previous residents.
In any case, Wangfa didn’t bother trying to get any closer than the outer edge of the Charred Fields. That, and he didn’t really care. What mattered to him was that he had gotten out, and now he had enough supplies and food to last several years if not the rest of his life. All he had to do was keep his head low and wait things out. He doubted things would ever get back to the way they had been, but he hadn’t been doing all that well before the world fell apart anyway. When the outbreak began, he had been waiting in a cell for his court-martial date.
The silo door banged open and Guo walked out, wearing a button-down shirt over dress pants held up by leather suspenders. At least he had finally stopped wearing suits, that pretentious prick. The man, smoking a pipe, scanned the area and pointed at the pile of cords Wangfa had spent most of the morning building.
“Look at this mess,” he grumbled. The least you can do is stack it neatly.”
Wangfa let it slide. Guo’s usefulness would soon run out. The old man still believed all this foolishness about the Living Revolution even as he willingly abandoned the Beacon of Light. All his long-winded speeches about retreating to rebuild and how this was the new Long March before taking back the land were just the delusions of an old man clinging to power.
Unfortunately, at least half of the people who had fled with them here to the Smoker’s silo still believed in the secretary. His support was eroding by the day, however. It would only be a matter of time before Wangfa disposed of the useless fool.
But not yet. “Yes, Secretary,” he replied, splitting another cord. He finished his work and brought the pile inside, nodding to a few guards busy with their assorted chores. There were twenty of them total, approximately half administrators and half guards. Five to ten too many in his opinion. They had needed the manpower at the time to transport all the supplies. Soon it would be time to whittle down the excess.
They were still trying to get settled. Who knew smoking food was so difficult and time-consuming? In any case, after nearly a month, Wangfa was beginning to get antsy from being cooped up here. They had cleared nearly a third of the Beacon’s armory and had more guns and ammunition than they could use in a lifetime. Guo had initially planned to use it for barter if the need arose, but Wangfa had other ideas. As soon as he took over, he planned to round up some of the stronger guards and raid their surroundings. Maybe now was the time to bring back the age of warlords. He was still stacking the cords of wood—neatly—when Guo shouted for him.
“Wangfa, there’s a jiāngshī out here! It’s coming for me!”
Wangfa rolled his eyes and exchanged knowing looks with Lubin, or the húndàn twin as they called him behind his back, as he took his time putting the last few cords onto the pile. This happened every few days. A jiāngshī would wander near the silo, and Guo would lose his mind. It baffled him how it was even possible that Guo had yet to kill one. He headed back outside. The silo was far enough away from the main roads that they weren’t in any real danger. The building was also near-impregnable, and with several years’ supply of food on hand, they could wait anything out.
Wangfa stood next to the cringing Guo. Just as he suspected: a lone jiāngshī was plodding slowly toward them. It was a big boy, well-fed in his previous life, wearing what looked like workman’s trousers. Wangfa was about to pick up his rifle when he yanked the ax out of the wood stump instead. Why waste a bullet? He hefted it over his shoulder and strolled forward.
He was about to shear the thing’s head off when something familiar about it stopped him. Wangfa squinted, and then he laughed. “Hey, it’s Ming. He finally found us.”
It was Ming’s job to cook the books so no one would know that the secretary was moving the supplies from the settlement to the silo. Because of that, he had to flee the Beacon right after people started having problems trying to locate nonexistent pallets of foodstuffs while at the same time opening empty crates that were supposed to contain weapons and ammunition. Guo had sent the quotamaster to the horse ranch to hide. Nobody had faith that Ming would hold up under interrogation.
Wangfa had journeyed to the horse ranch a few weeks ago to check up on Ming. He and his small group of collaborators weren’t there. Wangfa hadn’t shed any tears.
Guo must have thought the same thing. “At least we know now.”
One hard swipe with the ax cleaved Ming’s head clean off, sending it bouncing on the ground. Wangfa gave himself a running start and kicked it, sending the head flying off into the bushes.
“Hey,” yelled Guo. “What did I tell you about leaving body parts scattered about? I don’t want this place to smell. Go pick it up and dump the body down the hill.”
Wangfa bit back his sharp retort. “Yes, Secretary.”
He bent down to pick up the decapitated body.
Guo continued to bark. “Next time kill it farther away from where we eat and sleep, so it doesn’t make a mess all over—”
Wangfa grunted as he wrapped his hands around the body and lifted it up. Guo did have a point. Still, what was he saying before he got cut off? Wangfa had dragged the body only a few meters before he turned and saw another jiāngshī. This one was in military fatigues and looked familiar too, except there was so much crud on his face Wangfa couldn’t make out who he could have been. He must have been a guard or a windrunner. Maybe he was one of Ming’s men.
In any case, it was just one more slow, stupid jiāngshī to kill. He needed the exercise after being cooped up in the silo. Wangfa dropped Ming’s headless body unceremoniously to the ground and hefted the ax again. Interestingly, the jiāngshī wasn’t coming at him. It was just standing there. Well, maybe this thing had been supremely lazy in life, which somehow carried over to unlife. Wangfa aimed for the crown of its head and swung his ax.
The jiāngshī stepped aside and the ax sunk harmlessly into the ground. Stunned, Wangfa scrambled backward. The thing just stood there, looking at him with a strange intensity.
Wangfa squinted again, throwing a thumb at it as he turned toward Guo. “Did you just see…”
There were two more standing next to the secretary. One had a hand covering Guo’s neck and a knife pressed into the soft flesh of his throat. Like the one standing in front of him, they were w
earing some sort of military or police fatigues, like what windrunners wore…
That’s when Wangfa realized why the first looked familiar. He began his next ax swing without even looking, hoping to catch the one standing close to him off guard. As his ax whistled through the air, he turned to face his foe; a hard blow to his gut knocked the wind out of him and doubled him over, gasping.
A pair of intense, yellow-tinted eyes stared into his. “You look well, Wangfa.”
“Hengyen… I thought you were dead.” The blade twisted in his stomach. Wangfa’s body gave, and he fell onto his knees.
“Unfortunately for you, no. The typhoon tried, but as you can see, the true Living Revolution does not die so easily. It took me a while to track Ming down. He gave you away so quickly.”
“That bastard,” hissed Wangfa. “That’s what we get for trusting an accountant…”
The blade twisted once more, and then Hengyen let him crumple to the ground. The world went sideways as Hengyen left him where he lay and walked toward Guo. Several more figures appeared from the woods. He recognized several familiar faces: Fang, Shanshan, Lin… windrunners and guards who had stayed at the Beacon and fought with Hengyen until the very end. How did they survive the typhoon?
“Windmaster,” Guo quivered. “I’m so glad to see you’re alive. You were right all along. A tactical retreat was the right decision. That’s what I’m trying to do. We needed a contingency plan to safeguard our supplies. I’m ensuring the survival of the Living Revolution.”
“You are correct, Secretary,” Hengyen said. “The Living Revolution is indeed alive and well. Its true nature, however, is not to simply stand against the dead. The dead are not our only enemy. Like the Civil War and the Cultural Revolution before, the Living Revolution must not only defeat enemies from the outside, we must also cleanse ourselves from the inside. Only when the tainted and corrupted are gone will the survivors be pure and golden.”
Hengyen flicked his hand, and Guo fell to the ground, his head separated from his body. Wangfa tried to crawl away, but the debilitating agony was too intense, and his legs refused to do as they were told. Hengyen looked at him one last time dismissively before heading into the silo.
Screams began to fill the air.
EPILOGUE
Elena’s breath caught as the shadow of the impossibly tall, alien, and utterly beautiful column stretched along the ground, creeping toward the mouth of their caravan. Several other huge stone columns jutted into the sky, red stone layers framed by vegetation that somehow managed to grow on the near-vertical buttes. This magical moment was the only reason she volunteered for predawn watch duty. It gave her a small reminder that not all was ugly in the world, that there was still beauty if you had the patience and the perspective to look for it.
She shifted on top of the hood of the hollowed-out utility van holding their dried fruits and grain, her bow resting in her lap. The caravan had arrived at Zhangjiajie National Park near Yuanjiajie, or Hallelujah Mountain, as it was known in English, three days ago. Though the trek was only slightly over two hundred kilometers, it had taken them over a month to negotiate the long, winding, difficult landscape, fighting jiāngshī every step of the way. They were forced to circle around to the western side of the park to avoid several impassable villages.
But they had made it. The caravan had cleared a stone square in what was once a tourist area. They set up a temporary camp and circled the wagons like in those old American Westerns, and for the past three days, they had sent out scouting parties to search for Ahui’s team. The park was huge, and their best guess was they were somewhere on the northwestern side, which was honestly a lot of ground to cover. It could take weeks if not longer, Xupin had said. He was the scout who had returned to gather the village. That was fine with Elena. It wasn’t like she was in a hurry, at least not anymore.
A rustling from the trees caught her attention. Her hand drifted to her bow, and she loosely nocked an arrow. A few seconds later, the jiāngshī of a young man wearing a Houston Rockets cap appeared. He ambled up to the paved stone and made a few more steps before an arrow through the throat sent him flying back into the grass. Elena grimaced at the errant shot. She had missed his eye because she was trying to avoid hitting the cap.
Elena slid off the hood of the van and walked over to the jiāngshī, casually drawing her knife from her hip. The jiāngshī, an American by the looks of it, was still writhing on the ground, wiggling side-to-side like a turtle on its back. Elena had seen more foreigners at the park in three days than she had seen since the outbreak. In fact, probably half of the jiāngshī she had put down since she arrived had been Caucasian.
She sank the blade into the thing’s eye, then picked up the dirty cap. It smelled like rot and stale water, but not anything she wasn’t used to. A good cleaning should do the trick. This cap was probably the closest thing to home she was ever going to get. Since she had agreed to accompany Zhu to the Pillars, she had essentially accepted the fact that her chances of ever seeing home and her family again were zero.
Elena would never know what had happened to her family. She would never come home, never hug her mom, laugh with her dad, poke fun at her little brother. She would never get to tell them how much she loved them, never get to apologize for not being there when they needed her. As far as Elena was concerned, she did not deserve to have closure. This was her penance for her sins.
Elena scanned the brush for any more movement. Finding none, her eyes drifted to the canopies of trees growing outward from the sides of the pillars in the distance. This place sure was beautiful. She rinsed the cap in a nearby puddle to get any traces of jiāngshī off it, then hung it off her duffel to dry.
As she returned to the caravan, Shenyang walked out from the circle to take the next shift. The girl’s face tightened when she noticed Elena, and a hand unwittingly rose to her scarred cheek. The gash on her face had healed, but other scars would stay with her for the rest of her life. Shenyang wasn’t scared of Elena anymore. The girl had had plenty of time to wean herself of the terror during their long trip to the Precipitous Pillars. Now that fear had been replaced with pure hatred, and, like the jiāngshī infection, hatred was contagious.
Never underestimate the rage of a teenage girl, not that Elena blamed Shenyang after what she had done. The girl had told the entire village multiple times in gruesome detail about her torture. Everyone had already hated Elena; they despised her even more after. Not even the fact that she was the one who had rescued them and kept them alive during the journey. As far as the villagers were concerned, the white devil was the one who had singlehandedly put every villager in chains. Never mind that she had just been a peon following the orders of others…
Elena was the only one here for them to focus their rage on, so they did. She didn’t blame them. Their anger wasn’t misplaced. Their family and friends had died. She deserved every ounce of enmity thrown her way. Elena stayed humble and tried her best to fit in. She shot Shenyang a smile and waved. “Good morning.”
“Yángguĭzi,” the girl spat, turning her back to Elena.
That meant “foreign devil,” which might as well be Elena’s new name, since many of the villagers now called her that. If Zhu and Meili hadn’t pleaded for them to allow Elena to join the moving village, they probably would have killed her. They may still have done it, but they all quickly realized that she was far and away their best fighter, forager, survivor—everything, really. They knew that the village would not have made it to the Precipitous Pillars without her. It didn’t make them like her any more; it just forced them to tolerate her.
Elena brushed it off and was about to head inside the circle to find some breakfast when Shenyang whistled a warning. Both women raced to the edge of the northern clearing, bow and crossbow at the ready. Within a few seconds, a half dozen villagers appeared at the perimeter. Thirty more joined them ten seconds after that. Elena took a quick check of who was there, and who was supposed to be there. As the unoffici
al—but de facto—head of security, it was her job to keep the village’s defenses sharp. They were still a far cry from the windrunners back at the Beacon, but they were getting there.
Something substantial was emerging from behind a small pillar. By the sounds of it, a large group. Whatever it was could be big enough to give the village trouble. Elena made a series of hand signals: no shot until her first, no chasing, no guns unless humans. The village had managed to scrounge up two pistols and three rifles during their journey, along with exactly 142 rounds among all the guns. Her brother had had more than that in his gun locker at home.
A few moments later, several figures appeared out in the open. Elena counted twenty. The moment she recognized a friendly face, she raised her bow so it pointed straight up. The rest of the village immediately lowered their weapons.
“It’s Xupin,” someone called out. “He’s found Ahui!”
Elena had tried to instill some discipline during their journey. The village had chafed at first, but they came around to her rules quickly once they began encountering gusts of jiāngshī daily. Right now, however, all her training fell to the wayside. The villagers rushed their kin like students rushing the court at a basketball game.
A smile broke on her face at the revelry. There was much hugging and pats on the back and laughter. Lots of laughter. These were not only old friends reuniting: the village finding the group here meant they were one step closer to settling down and starting over. It meant their long journey was finally coming to an end. Elena was all right letting discipline slide for this. She made it her business to keep watch while the rest of the village celebrated. This wasn’t her party, anyway.
It wasn’t until the merriment subsided that a face caught her attention. Meili was embracing one particular woman for so long that they could have been mistaken for lovers. That wasn’t what caught Elena’s eye, however.
