Typhoon Read online

  When they were little, Ahui used to steal ramen packs from their mother’s convenience store. During their afternoon naps, she would stay up and suck on the pepper packs. That went on for an entire summer until năinai discovered a mound of opened ramen packages with the noodles discarded under her bed. Of course, being the older brother, Zhu never gave her up and took the blame. To this day he couldn’t recall a time when he was switched that badly.

  That was when he noticed it.

  Zhu got up and walked to the desk closest to the window. He pushed aside the dusty notebooks and manual pencil sharpener and pulled down a discolored photo taped to the wall. It was a picture of a scrawny twelve-year-old boy wearing a stupid grin flanked by two girls, both slightly younger. All three were in school uniforms. The boy and one of the girls could have passed for twins. The other girl had a thin oval face and large striking eyes. She would have been pretty if it weren’t for that crooked smile. Perhaps, Zhu considered, she was pretty in spite of it.

  It didn’t matter. These were ghosts living only in the past. The only thing that mattered now was moving forward. On the back of the photo was an inscription in black marker: Ahui and Meili and annoying brother. Primary school graduation. Age 10.

  Zhu flipped the photo back to the desk and left the room. A part of him thought he should take the photo with him. It was the only picture he had of his sister. Another, more urgent part of him couldn’t handle the guilt that rose up and gnawed at him every time he looked at it, so he left it where it belonged: in the past. He felt the tears coming, then, as he opened the bathroom door.

  Instantly, his nose was hit with the strong odor of death. Without a sound, a mostly skeletal figure toppled out onto him from the dark. It wrapped both hands around his arm holding the doorknob and nearly tore a piece out. Taken completely by surprise, Zhu fumbled for his machete, lost his balance, and flailed backward.

  He threw a punch on instinct and knocked it down, sending it tumbling into a heap on the floor. Zhu shook his bruised hand; punching bone was not pleasant. Annoyed, he stomped over to the fallen jiāngshī and kicked aside the arm stretching out for him. He reached for his machete… but hesitated.

  For a moment, recognition stayed his hand. Whoever it was in its life had already been old before it died. Was it the narrow eyes or the tattered braided hair or the glints of gold in the teeth? Something he couldn’t quite get his mind around. Before his head could play any more tricks on him, he drew his machete and brought it down hard on the jiāngshī’s head, splitting its skull nearly in two. He moaned as cold realization, mixed with guilt and fury, took over. Zhu brought his machete up and hacked at the jiāngshī several more times until it was completely still.

  The mixture of adrenaline and rage finally left his body, and he deflated. A chill passed through him as he stared at the withered and emaciated corpse, pathetic even by jiāngshī standards. There was no mistaking who this was. His ninety-nine-year-old grandmother, abandoned and left alone to die. Her final moments must have been terrible. That thought ate Zhu up inside. It must have been a difficult choice for his family to make. He had no right to be angry or to judge them, however. He hadn’t been here. Maybe things would have been different if he had. Maybe he could have saved them. Maybe everyone would still be alive if it weren’t for his absence. A choked hiss escaped Zhu’s lips, and he stormed out of the bathroom and back into the living room.

  By now, a small fire was burning in the stove, and a glow of warmth pushed back the damp air. Elena, nurturing it, looked up, puzzled. “Everything all right?”

  He did his best to mask the welling in his eyes. “I need some fresh air.”

  “Hey xiăodì,” said Bo excitedly, brandishing a half-empty Styrofoam tray of black oval objects, as if he had found gold. “I found hundred-year-old eggs. We’re going to feast tonight.”

  Zhu didn’t reply as he stepped onto the balcony overlooking the Yuanjiang.

  “Something I said?” asked Bo.

  Zhu leaned over the balcony and watched the shore on the other side. The smell of fish and algae and dank rot filled his nostrils. A bloated corpse floated past a family of geese. Shortly after, another corpse floated by and then a dozen more, followed by a clutter of debris. He paid the ghastly image barely more than a thought. Probably a capsized boat. Sights likes this downstream along the rivers weren’t uncommon.

  Elena joined him on the balcony a few seconds later. Her arm looped around his waist, and she leaned into him. “Hey, is everything all right? You’ve been twitchy all day.”

  Zhu pulled her close and inhaled. She smelled like someone who had been wandering in the wilderness through mud and garbage for weeks, which was a given. It was a combination of sweat and dirt and something that honestly smelled a little like feces. But below all that, Zhu smelled her. It was wonderful. He gave her a small squeeze. “I’m just worried about going so deep into an urban area.”

  “First rule you taught me about survival,” she reminded him. “Stay away from population centers. I’m kind of surprised you came up with this plan.”

  “We had no choice,” he replied. “We haven’t hit quota in weeks. We need a good scavenge.”

  “But all the way out here? How do you even know about this pot at the end of the rainbow?”

  Zhu wasn’t sure what that meant; Elena’s American vernacular didn’t always translate well in Mandarin. It was part of her charm. He sniffed the air. “Something smells like rotten eggs.”

  “Bo smashed a shelf for firewood that was coated with tar. We’re cooking dinner now,” she replied. “That stove is ancient. It looks like it came from the Ming dynasty.”

  He sighed. “What else is for dinner?”

  Elena took on a haughty British accent that could pass for a bad mix of Singaporean and American cowboy. “Today’s appetizer is stale water in a flask with a squirt of chlorine flavoring. The main course is peanut sticky rice wrapped in dried banana leaves. Dessert is a can of durian that you and Bo can share between the two of you.” She paused. “We also have those hideous egg things Bo found.”

  Zhu made a face. “This menu is terrible. I want to talk to the manager.”

  “Of course, sir. You can lodge a complaint here.” She gave him the middle finger, then switched to her pinky, which was the Chinese way, and then broke into a grin. “Seriously, though—if we’re going to finally hit quota, the first thing I want to do with the points is get real fruit.”

  “Durian is real fruit.”

  “We can agree to disagree.” She pointed at the horizon. “There’s a fog rolling in. If it’s still here tomorrow, we’re going to be trapped in this village. We definitely shouldn’t be exploring in the middle of it.”

  “It’ll be gone by morning.”

  “How are you sure?”

  “It will,” replied Zhu confidently. He craned his head and looked back into the room. “What’s Bo doing inside?”

  “Reading his books.”

  Bo was the only one on the team who had been too poor to own any electronic devices prior to the collapse. Zhu carried a point-and-shoot camera and a small MP3 player loaded with music, while Elena had everything: camera, phone, MP3 player, and one of those fancy portable DVD players as well. All Bo had were books. On the one hand, that was fine, because he never had to pay the points to charge his entertainment, but it also meant he was often relegated to reading the same few books he had in his possession over and over again. Zhu had put his foot down about him carrying only one book at a time on scavenges.

  “I wish I could read Hànzì better,” said Elena wistfully. “What’s the word for that sort of story again?”

  “Wŭxiá, which means ‘martial heroes.’ It’s where all those kung fu stories originated from. I can teach you to read better, if you’d like. After all, you did such a good job with my English lessons, before all this happened,” said Zhu, searching for her hand.

  “The apprentice has now become the master,” she smiled, letting him lead h
er inside.

  Dinner was exactly as described, sticky rice with peanuts and soy sauce wrapped with banana leaves. Zhu and Elena both gave Bo a little bit of theirs, since the big man was easily their total weight combined. She also gave him her share of the durian.

  The woodstove leaked as much smoke into the room as it funneled out, but the team was willing to put up with anything to keep the chill away. They passed the time sharing their limited entertainment, listening to music on Zhu’s MP3 player and clustering around Elena’s small screen to watch videos. Afterward, Bo read aloud from his wŭxiá book while Zhu helped Elena with her Mandarin.

  They huddled closer to the stove as night fell and the temperature dropped. It became too dark to read, so Elena regaled them with stories of her life in America, telling them how her folks would go boating nearly every weekend, and how they barbecued and strolled along sandy beaches and did something called “tubing” on a great river known as the Colorado. She told them about how her father took her and her brother Robbie bowhunting for white-tailed deer. Certainly explained why she was such a good shot.

  Every time she talked about home, Elena’s face would light up. It was obvious how badly she missed her family. Being so far away when the world had fallen apart must have torn her up inside. She hadn’t heard anything from America since she and Zhu had evacuated from Changsha in the early days of the disaster.

  Bo raised a hand as she tried to explain tubing to them again. “I don’t understand.” He ticked his fingers. “Your family has their own boat that you drive around for fun, not going anywhere or carrying anything. But then you also like to sit on tire tubes and float on the lake for fun.”

  She nodded. “It’s not about actually going anywhere. It was about being together and enjoying the experience. Besides, there were always parties on Lake Travis. We’d cruise around and tie a couple of boats together and everybody just had a good time.”

  Bo looked a little confounded. Zhu didn’t blame him. The two of them hailed from rural villages, Zhu from western Hunan and Bo from somewhere far up north. Both had left farms to find work in the city and ended up working next to each other on the assembly line in a factory. Zhu had met Elena shortly after when he was looking for an English tutor.

  Bedtime music was a mix of gŭzhēng folk, classic Andy Lau, and Chinese death metal—the last one being somewhat of a recently acquired taste. Bo took the space next to the stove while Zhu and Elena shared a sleeping bag. One less sleeping bag to pack meant much more room for salvage to haul back to the settlement.

  Zhu first checked the stove and added a few more pieces of wood from the shelf Bo had smashed with his sledgehammer. He checked the pipes once more to make sure the smoke was filtering out of the apartment. It would be a shame for them to survive the jiāngshī apocalypse only to succumb to smoke inhalation.

  By the time he crept into the sleeping bag he shared with Elena, she had already dozed off. Zhu wrapped his arms around her protectively as she instinctively pressed her back into his chest. He blinked once, feeling the exhaustion weigh down his consciousness. He glanced to his side to see Bo still reading his book using his head lamp as a light.

  “We have an early day tomorrow,” he said.

  The light turned off. “Okay, xiăodì. Sleep well.” The big man must have been exhausted. He was out within seconds, and soon his loud, labored snores that sounded not unlike a hissing jiāngshī filled the room.

  To Zhu’s dismay, Elena, nuzzling inside the crook of his armpit, added to the chorus, her soft breathing alternating with Bo’s loud hisses. Together, they fell into a rhythm that was soon joined by the cicadas singing just outside.

  Zhu continued to stare up at the ceiling of his childhood home well after this strange symphony had finally subsided. He wondered if jiāngshī slept, if they remembered any traces of their former lives, and if their souls were still in their bodies somehow. He mainly thought about his năinai sitting there all that time in the toilet, waiting for nothing.

  He hoped desperately that the grandmother he loved and cherished had truly died alongside her body all those months ago and that her soul was now with the rest of her loved ones. She wouldn’t have to wonder then, wouldn’t have to worry, and most of all she wouldn’t be lonely. The last thought he had before sleep swept over him was feeling guilty that he was allowed to escape and slip away into blissful unconsciousness.

  2 THE TYPHOON OF DEAD

  The long line of jiāngshī shuffled, almost politely, single file down a narrow dirt path. Their leader, a scrawny teenager missing half his face, stopped when the nearby pond began to burp bubbles. The teenage jiāngshī grunted and stared, tilting his head to one side. The body behind him bumped into him, and then the one behind that did the same, setting off a cascade down the line until the forward momentum forced the first jiāngshī to start moving again. The line walked on, an eerie, near-silent procession.

  Perched on a branch directly above the path, Ying Hengyen, leader of the Beacon of Light’s wind teams, noted the scene with irony. In a way, what had just transpired was the perfect metaphor for the jiāngshī outbreak. A few walking dead were of little consequence, but add them all up and they become an unstoppable, uncontrollable force of nature, consuming everything in its path. Death, powered by mindless inertia.

  The windmaster had originally considered staying in hiding and letting this line of jiāngshī pass, but decided there was no use in delaying the inevitable. The team would have to kill them now or kill them later on the way back. Might as well take the tactical advantage the current terrain offered.

  He put his fingers to his mouth and let out a weak warble. He had spent most of the day neck-deep in cold bog water, so he was numb all over. It did the job, however. As soon as the noise left his lips, three figures rose from the water, each raising a long spear. The sharp tips of the spears found their marks in seven jiāngshī before the rest even noticed.

  As soon as the dead turned their backs to him, Hengyen and Linnang dropped down from the trees directly on top of two jiāngshī, and then attacked the rest from behind. Hengyen, wielding two long daggers, hacked expertly, taking down four. Linnang, the newest member of the wind team, was fighting next to him with a large ax. They chopped and stabbed, slowly retreating up the heavily forested hill as the once-orderly line dissolved into a feral mob. The two men took position behind several brambles and picked off the jiāngshī that got caught.

  The rest of Hengyen’s wind team surged forward, using their long spears to carve up the others. When the jiāngshī turned their attention on them again, they would retreat into the water, where the clumsy dead moved poorly.

  The path and pond were soon littered with body parts and stained with blood. Hengyen and Linnang came out of the brush and checked the downed jiāngshī, finishing off any that were still moving. Within a few minutes, the wind team of five had killed more than five times their number. All except for their “leader,” who had continued to wander farther down the trail, oblivious to the fact that his retinue had been slaughtered.

  Linnang pulled out a throwing knife and aimed. Hengyen drew his knife at the same time. Linnang’s blade flew from his fingertips first, arcing through the air and missing the young jiāngshī’s head by a handspan. The jiāngshī turned around to face them just in time to receive Hengyen’s blade in one eye.

  Hengyen patted the newest member of his wind team on the shoulder. “Spare a second. Save a life.”

  “Yes, dàgē.” The young man blushed in embarrassment.

  Hengyen turned to the other three on his team who were climbing out of the water, offering his hand to each to pull them up. The team quickly regrouped and continued up the trail that cut along one side of the gorge. In the distance directly ahead of them was a highway bridge that spanned the chasm. A steady stream of jiāngshī was crossing it. Even from a distance, the sounds of their moans and movement filled the air. Every once in a while, a jiāngshī would fall over the side and plummet to the rocks
below with a loud crack, like hail striking a tin roof. The sounds reverberated throughout the gorge, echoes lingering in the air.

  They moved quickly, staying alert as they passed into the shadow of the bridge. The ground at their feet was littered with bodies: jiāngshī that had stumbled off the roadway above. Most had been crushed beyond recognition, but a few still stirred, raising their twisted and broken limbs at the wind team. Hengyen’s people finished any they found as they passed with efficient, mercenary strikes.

  Six months ago, this ghastly site would have churned Hengyen’s stomach. Now it was just another day scouting east of the Beacon of Light. One of the first instructions Hengyen gave every wind team recruit was to scavenge in the direction of the setting sun. To venture east was to invite death. To the east lay the remnants of the big cities, where the outbreak had begun, and where the jiāngshī numbered greater than the stars in the heavens.

  His wind team was the only one allowed to venture in this direction, because they had a more important job than making a quota. Hengyen was one of the few remaining professional soldiers, and his sole objective was to ensure the survival of the Beacon. For the past few weeks, there had been a drastic uptick in jiāngshī flowing in from the east. He and his team of crack scavengers were the only ones with the experience and skill to walk into jiāngshī territory and investigate what was going on.

  Since the beginning of the outbreak, Hengyen had fought on the front line against the dead. As a captain of one of the elite Falcon Commando Units in the Armed Police Force of the People’s Liberation Army, he and his men were some of the first on the ground when the city of Hangzhou fell into chaos and panic. The only information they received were scattered reports of people infected by a terrible virus that caused them to go insane and attack others.