Rain Bell | January

Rain Bell

01-01 00:09 Scattered firecrackers went off around the compound, sounding oddly out of place in all this darkness. Most people must already be asleep. I kissed my wife on the forehead, watched her drift off, then stepped onto the balcony. The red light on the camera mounted to the tripod blinked steadily like the eye of a Terminator. Far below, the white steel helmets of the sentries caught the searchlights in cold flashes, as if to remind me that time means nothing. It is only a ruler with which we measure our own suffering.

01-01 00:50 Yesterday’s surveillance yielded quite a lot. At the very least, we now know that the snow-camouflage unit with “Special Biological Epidemic Prevention” on their chest tabs is studying plant immunity. Two captains who move in and out frequently are botany specialists. Their shoulder patch shows a soldier in a helmet holding a stalk of wheat, and their notebook covers are stamped in gold with the name Malianwa University. For days now they have been studying the plant species growing inside wounded humans and animals, as well as the causes of death.

01-01 01:09 Old Ma’s son failed to stash the iPhone inside the clubhouse office, so we’ll have to think of another way to bug the place. We spent the day in the chatroom discussing escape routes. Everyone’s GPS still works, and with offline maps we sketched out two options: one southward, entering Yunnan by the Chengdu-Panzhihua expressway, the other northwest along the Chengdu-Lanzhou route toward Qinghai. I favor the second. The plateau has far less vegetation, so it is obviously less likely to be affected.

01-01 22:39 Today the compound recovered a little of its usual atmosphere. The courtyard was crowded, and everyone was forcing out New Year smiles. The troops brought in some canned food, stacked it into pagoda-like towers, and organized games where residents could win prizes. These were the most grimly serious games I have ever seen in my life. Every contest devolved into life-or-death arguments, because the ownership of every single can had become a question of continued survival.

01-01 22:56 I won eleven cans today: five from a slow-bicycle race and six from a ping-pong wheel game. For the first time ever, my wife praised the money I’d spent on my bicycle and racket as having been worth it. I stayed away from any game involving bodily contact. Almost every one of those ended in shoving matches, and the military police had to point guns at both sides to make them stop. Several of the middle-aged women from property management were competing in shuttlecock kicking. They looked as though they hadn’t eaten properly in days, so unsteady on their feet that they dropped to their knees begging the soldiers for a consolation prize.

01-01 23:08 Chengdu has gone completely dark now, soaked through by the freezing rain peculiar to New Year’s Day, like a cardboard box hauled out of water. The ground is covered with several centimeters of ashy mud. Every building has lost its former color and been reduced to the same dirty, withered tone. It has been raining on and off since dawn, and outside the window, besides the sound of rain, that low, oppressive groan of twisting steel, like some gigantic beast, has risen over the city once again.

01-01 23:22 Today one of the officers let slip that in a few days they would be withdrawing north. The satellite connection confirmed it. For the first time today, we received an official push notification: Lanzhou had been temporarily elevated into the capital, and the Lanzhou Military Region had established an overall disaster-response command. All personnel and supplies are pulling westward. The government has restored radio service on AM110.1, broadcasting evacuation plans and route maps. There is still no news, only survival manuals and official bulletins.

01-02 08:39 Early this morning Chenglong Road was already filling with cars and pedestrians trying to leave the city, no doubt because they heard yesterday’s broadcast. I had no idea there were still so many people in the urban districts. God knows how many are still clinging to life in all those hidden lanes and blocks. The checkpoints are much looser now. The strict immunity inspections of the previous days have been reduced to a few simple questions. Our compound, however, remains stubbornly sealed. But hungry people cannot be locked up for long.

01-02 12:24 It has started sleeting outside, and the temperature inside the apartment has dropped below freezing. My wife stuck warming patches on herself and curled up under the quilt with Mango in her arms. On the computer I exported the photos from the past sixty hours into an animation, hoping to track the sentries’ shift changes. Instead I discovered that six body bags were taken out of the compound late last night. No new wounded have been brought in these past two days. So either the bags did not contain corpses, or they contained residents from our compound. What the hell are they doing?

01-02 14:18 At noon I told the others what I had found. Old Ma said we had to get the iPhone into the clubhouse no matter what. In truth there has always been an opportunity to place the bug. The only reason he hesitated was that he couldn’t bear sending his own son through the ventilation duct. This time he finally hardened himself. PL quietly asked me whether we had too many people now. Counting the families of the nine of us already in the chatroom, that makes twenty-five people total. Starting eight cars at once would alert every sentry in the compound. I told him the more people we have, the better our odds of staying alive.

01-02 15:04 Someone from property management just came knocking. It was the same men I injured before. They pounded for a long time, clearly intending not to leave until I opened up. My wife had only just gotten up and was still packing. This time we’re not packing just emergency survival gear, so naturally there is too much we want to take. Mango is a problem. A cat isn’t like a dog that can be carried along at all times, especially not a pampered house cat that’s afraid even of mice. Damn it! Someone is smashing the door! 2

01-02 15:41 They’ve finally run off. The living room is a wreck. The glass tabletop is shattered, and there’s a large pool of blood on the floor. Those three guards only wanted to strip us of food and water. I shot through the arms of two of them, and I think the third one may have a broken humerus. My forehead has been split open in a triangular gash, and my right ribs ache dully. Thank God my wife locked the bedroom door in time. I should never have opened the door. I was not prepared enough for cruelty. I will not make that mistake twice.

01-02 17:14 Old Ma’s son pulled it off. Good for him! PL has synced the incoming feed to my laptop. The iPhone has been tucked inside the grille over the air-conditioner drain hole, so all we can see are feet moving back and forth inside the room. No one is speaking. There’s only the low hum of the instruments. The real experiments are probably happening in a different room. I’m hoping they might still say something here that gives the game away. My wife says Mango is nowhere to be found. Could she have bolted out during the chaos earlier?

2011-01-02 21:07 We’ve been listening for hours and have roughly pieced it together: our compound is a closed sample set of cases. “Every stage of the condition is represented.” “Humans, animals, and plants are all typologically useful.” “At the current stage it is no longer infectious to humans.” “But not a single one can be let go” … Put all of that into one sentence and the meaning is simple: we are lab rats. There is only one road left now. I had originally thought we could hold out at home for at least three months.

2011-01-02 22:32 The rain is still falling on and off, and we’ve decided to leave tonight. Three families have backed out, unwilling to take the risk. That leaves six households, fifteen people, and five vehicles. The exit point will be the fence between Buildings 9 and 10. Its base has already been sawn nearly through with a wire saw, and all we need to do is hook a tow line to it and pull it down with a car. Just now, while loading supplies, I discovered that the rear window of my Robin Hood had been smashed. The drinking water stored in the car is gone. Luckily the vehicle itself is fine, and none of the tools were taken.

2011-01-03 03:51 What just happened was genuinely hair-raising. We set out at exactly three in the morning, but only four vehicles made it out. The Subaru’s chassis was too low and got hung up at the last moment on the concrete footing of the fence. They opened fire. PL’s Cherokee had a side window shot out, Old Ma’s Tiggo took a graze to the front tire, and the plastic sheeting I had used to patch my rear window got ripped away by the wind. Only Rabbit’s Range Rover escaped untouched. We’re in Sansheng Township now, stopping to sort out the cars.

2011-01-03 04:12 Our route was supposed to head south to the beltway, then swing west onto Dajian Road and keep going toward Ya’an. In the darkness, the skyline ahead was lit red by fire. I covered the rear window with a wooden board. The Tiggo is flimsy, and its spare tire is already on. We now have eleven people total: PL, Rabbit, and I are each with our wives; Old Ma has his family of three; and Blade and his wife, who had no car of their own and had originally split up between different vehicles, are now both riding in the Range Rover.

2011-01-03 05:00 The entire beltway has been dug apart. On the far side stand armed soldiers and tanks. No wonder the troops on the Third Ring had all withdrawn. They were redeploying to fortify the outer ring. Now we have no choice but to turn back and try circling north outside the Third Ring instead. I should have stood my ground earlier. We should have taken the northern route from the beginning. On the way we passed a Shell station, and the others all stopped to fill fuel cans. I tuned the radios in three of the cars. The Tiggo has no radio, so I gave Old Ma a walkie-talkie.

2011-01-03 09:59 Before dawn we spent hours looping slowly from south to east along side roads, because we were still trapped inside Chengdu’s hinterland. At the junction of the Chengdu-Chongqing Expressway and the beltway, we hit an outbound checkpoint, but we had no immunity certificates and were denied passage. PL tried to argue, and the sentry simply raised his rifle. We turned around at once. The beltway is sealed like an iron barrel. We’ve decided to follow it counterclockwise and see whether any gap appears.

2011-01-03 10:16 When we reached the area near Shiling, we could go no farther. The Chengdu-Nanchong Expressway was clogged with abandoned cars, all burned out, and the air was thick with suffocating toxic fumes. We put on our masks, discussed it briefly, and decided to turn left and drive back into the urban districts, hoping to skirt this blocked stretch and continue north. If luck is with us, maybe we can still find an epidemic-control station with staff inside willing to issue us certificates.

2011-01-03 14:17 We wound our way through the city center. Everywhere lay thick ash. Darkened buildings gave off a scorched smell, and curled electrical wires were tangled together with dead trees like a burned-out dark forest. We searched the whole morning without seeing a single military vehicle or epidemic-control point. Ragged people flickered through the streets and alleys, watching us with numb, empty faces. In many places there were clear signs of looting, and some of the gray mounds on the ground were unmistakably corpses.

2011-01-03 14:27 I worked out that we were not far from Jianshe Road, where several large shopping complexes stand. The other families had set out with far less in reserve than I had; you could say they went on the road in haste. I suggested that we restock at Ito Yokado, and everyone agreed. Old Ma noticed a smashed military vehicle by the roadside and warned us to stay alert. After a night of freezing rain and mud, our cars looked empty from a distance. Only Rabbit’s orange Range Rover stood out a little too much.

2011-01-03 16:12 The street-facing windows and doors of Ito Yokado on Jianshe Road were all shut tight, but the barrier at the entrance to the underground parking garage had been rammed apart. We hesitated only a moment before filing in. There were plenty of cars in the garage, none of them used for a long time and all coated in black ash. We stopped at the supermarket entrance on basement level one and were stunned to find a Hummer H5 parked there. One look at the plate told us it belonged to the neighbors who had escaped from our compound a few days ago.

2011-01-03 16:35 The H5 looks as though it has been sitting there for two days. The packs on board are still inside, but the people never came back. The supermarket’s rolling shutter has been pried open. We turned the Grand Cherokee’s high beams on into the darkness beyond the entrance, and Blade, Old Ma, and I put on headlamps and prepared to go in while the others stayed with the vehicles. I took the steel crossbow, Blade a machete, and Old Ma scavenged a fire axe on the spot. There were footprints on the floor from earlier intruders.

2011-01-03 18:13 The supermarket shelves were still remarkably intact. It seems the place had been evacuated before looting ever broke out in earnest. Old Ma and I added water and quick foods like sausages and smoked rabbit to our haul. PL and Rabbit very nearly packed their cars full. I warned them not to overload the suspension, so PL took some of the extra water back out. Rabbit, as usual, paid no attention. His vehicle already had the most passengers, and Blade and his wife also loaded up plenty of supplies. Then I heard a noise deeper inside the garage, somewhere down on level B2.

2011-01-03 19:33 By the time we fled out of Ito Yokado’s underground garage, night had already fallen. We never found the neighbors who had come in the Hummer, and of course we didn’t run into any zombie siege either. What we did see on level B2 were clusters of plants. They had the same tiny gray triangular leaves as the shoots growing from the eyes of that dead cat back in the compound. What truly frightened me was the base of one root cluster. Around it was looped a wedding ring.

2011-01-03 20:45 The uncanny scene at Ito Yokado is still fixed before my eyes. The others all say they didn’t see anything; they only heard me shout “Run!” and rushed out after me. I warned everyone again that they must not touch any plant life at all, not even fallen leaves. We’re not getting out of Chengdu tonight, so we need to find somewhere to bed down. Following Jianshe Road up to the First Ring Road, the University of Electronic Science and Technology lies to the north. We might as well camp on campus. After more than ten hours of scrambling, we are still only twenty kilometers from where we started.

2011-01-03 23:37 We parked the cars in a line beneath the basic-teaching building at UESTC. There are no greenbelts visible here, and all that concrete is strangely reassuring. Everyone is huddled inside the vehicles, taking turns on watch. I drew first shift. My wife is lying on the back seat under a thin blanket. I have the walkie-talkie and the steel crossbow, and I’m crouched under a rain sheet in the stone corridor opposite the teaching building. The inner city is not as quiet as the outskirts beyond the Third Ring. Sounds keep rising and falling all around, and a few buildings still show traces of light inside.

2011-01-04 08:21 Blade, who had the last watch, woke me at six this morning. Outside the cars everything was wet and glazed with a thin layer of ice. We boiled milk tea in a camping pot on the steps, while PL gathered a pile of books to burn for warmth. The campus was utterly silent. In the distance, the wooded paths and the sports field were buried under ginkgo leaves mixed with mud. All the trees are dead now, and branches keep dropping at random. Blade and Rabbit said they wanted to take a look around campus. Both of them graduated from UESTC.

2011-01-04 10:55 Blade came back from the campus clinic with some gauze and alcohol. Rabbit had been gone so long that we couldn’t even raise him on the radio. Only an hour later did he finally stagger back, still in shock. He had gone to see his old dormitory and been terrified by the sight of a student dead in bed. In his words, a patch of moss had grown across the mattress, and if you scraped back the dirt beneath it, bits of bone were still there. We’ve just turned east from the Chuanshaan Interchange now. You still can’t get out of the city that way.

2011-01-04 15:06 We lingered around the North Third Ring for a long time. It was almost noon before we finally discovered a short stretch north of Longtan Interchange with no sentries on it. We drove straight across and at last got out of the city again. The Tiggo’s fender got scorched melting as it crossed a firebreak trench. Let’s hope the undercarriage can survive whatever comes next. The Chengdu-Mianyang Expressway is also blocked solid with abandoned vehicles, but if we’re lucky, the ordinary road beside it may still let us head north all the way toward Deyang and Mianyang.

2011-01-04 15:09 Beyond the North Third Ring lies Chengdu’s largest panda conservation base. By the roadside we saw what looked like the bones of a panda. Not infected, hunted. Xindu and Qingbaijiang are still technically part of Chengdu. This area is one of the city’s rural-urban pilot zones, with hardly any farmland left in sight, only silent smokestacks and vast empty factory compounds. The built-up area of Xindu looked abandoned too. We drove past it as carefully as we could.

2011-01-04 21:50 If the GLONASS fix is accurate, we are now somewhere between Qingbaijiang and Shifang, still technically inside Chengdu’s administrative bounds. Since noon we have spent the day zigzagging around burning towns, covering 153 kilometers with appalling inefficiency. The GPS signal is gone, but luckily I have an old Russian navigation unit. The main problem is that the entire display is in Russian, so I have to guess at it by matching the screen against the map.

2011-01-04 22:02 The cars are parked out in the middle of open country. No dogs barking, no cooking smoke anywhere. Across a narrow water ditch stands a dead bamboo grove, and whenever the wind passes through, a shower of bamboo leaves rattles down. In a normal year, the faster-growing rapeseed would already be blooming by this season. Here the fields are nothing but blackened earth, as though the crops had all been burned down like straw. Blade fetched water from a nearby farmhouse well so we could wash up, but none of us dares drink it.

2011-01-04 22:48 Wearing electrician’s gloves, Blade cut down some bamboo and piled it into a bonfire. Before long it started raining again, so we all retreated to the vehicles. I kept scanning back and forth across the usual radio frequencies and heard nothing at all. At our current rate, the fuel in the cars will last only as far as Mianyang at most. Old Ma suggested that from tomorrow on we should follow the gas-station symbols on the map and log every station we find, whether it still has fuel or not. We need to move faster tomorrow, assuming nothing goes wrong.

2011-01-05 08:22 There was an earthquake before dawn. The flashlight I had propped on the dashboard fell over. By feel alone I’d put it at around magnitude four, which is a basic survival skill for anyone from Sichuan. When first light came, I noticed more than a dozen military trucks parked on another road about a kilometer away. Through the binoculars I could see People’s Armed Police plates on them. Someone must have fallen asleep on watch last night, because no one noticed them until now. I woke the others immediately so we could decide whether to hide or go over and make contact.

2011-01-05 09:23 The PAP sentries had actually spotted us long before we woke up. Once they saw us moving, they waved us over. It turned out they were troops from the Chengdu People’s Armed Police Command College, relocating toward Mianyang. They had a field kitchen truck, braised pork hocks, electricity, and they treated us to steaming bowls of ranmian. I asked whether we could trail their convoy, but one PAP instructor said no. Their route ran entirely through military-control zones. A soldier’s duty, he said, is obedience. Please understand.

2011-01-05 22:10 From morning until afternoon, in a cold rain, we kept trailing the PAP convoy from a distance. They had refused us in words, but in practice they tacitly allowed it. That made today’s progress much faster than yesterday’s. By a little after three we had already skimmed past Deyang. The land out here is just as desolate, but unlike Chengdu, the retreat here seems to have spun out of control. Luggage is strewn everywhere, and discarded shoes lie by the roadside.

2011-01-05 22:39 Somewhere near Luojiang, roughly thirty kilometers from Mianyang, a platoon leader came down from the PAP convoy and told us that from this point on we really could not keep following them. We needed to head east onto the Chengdu-Mianyang Expressway, he said. That was the officially designated evacuation route. Sure enough, before long we saw roadside signs reading No Entry and stone markers engraved with nuclear symbols. I knew then that we were drawing close to the nuclear-industrial zone around Mianyang.

2011-01-05 23:18 This was the first real split in our group. Should we follow the government’s evacuation route, or stick to the original plan and head west along the Chengdu-Lanzhou corridor? We put it to a vote, and the minority yielded to the majority. In the end the group chose the safer Baoji-Chengdu line. I was in the minority. Mianyang looks to be in better shape than Chengdu. There are fewer high-rises here, mostly broad factory buildings like container terminals, all roofed in the same gray-blue metal. We stopped for the night in the yard of an empty factory.

2011-01-06 00:14 This is the second night we’ve spent outdoors. I lashed several bags and spare fuel cans onto the roof, and at last there is enough room in the back of the car to lie flat. My wife and I climbed into our separate sleeping bags and reached out to hold hands. Old Ma has first watch. To avoid another stupid mistake like last night, we’ve shortened each shift, and every person now has to stand watch twice. This vast factory yard is more frightening than the wilderness. Shadows thicker than the night itself are pressing down around us.

2011-01-06 00:31 I had just started to drift off when a low mechanical rumble woke me again. Old Ma had heard it too. Seeing me jump out of the car, he made a hand signal. I followed the direction he pointed and saw that lights had come on inside a factory building several hundred meters away. The noise was a generator. Neither of us had brought headlamps, so we felt our way over in the dark and peered through the window. It looked like a canned-food processing plant. In one corner were piled stacks of empty green tin cans.

2011-01-06 00:32 There were around twenty people living inside, old and young together, and all the men were wearing dark blue work uniforms. Their bedding was spread out across the floor, with basins and kettles scattered everywhere. Several people were sitting around a long worktable strewn with dead chickens. Efficiently, almost expertly, they were plucking feathers, then using heavy shears to cut branches off the chickens’ bodies, if those things could still be called chickens, before tossing them into a gasoline drum filled with boiling water. My stomach lurched so hard I nearly vomited.

2011-01-06 00:40 Old Ma and I crept back to the cars and woke everyone without turning on any lights. I don’t know what kinds of people are living in those factory buildings now. I don’t know whether someone might throw me into an oil drum in the middle of the night. I would rather starve than eat that kind of thing. We agreed to get everyone back into the vehicles and leave at once. Fortunately the roads in the Mianyang development zone haven’t been wrecked yet, so we can still drive fast. Back to the open country. Don’t let the shadows cover my eyes.

2011-01-06 09:05 I dreamed that I was rereading a story from Tihu Notes. In Hexi there is said to be a shrub whose seeds, once eaten by beasts, cling undigested to the intestinal wall. Only after the animal dies do they sprout where the carcass falls, feeding on the corpse and growing into a fresh thicket. Local herdsmen, in winter, often find frozen animals with branches protruding from their mouths, noses, and bodies. I woke sticky with cold sweat all over me. When I climbed up to look outside, the sky was hanging so low and dark it seemed ready to scrape the earth.

2011-01-06 09:10 We drove more than ten li last night before stopping on a country road black as spilled ink. Ditches run along both sides of the road, and in places it is so narrow you can’t even turn around. Thinking about it calmly now, the people in that factory probably weren’t desperate enough to be eating mutated poultry themselves. More likely they were hardening their consciences and supplying food to the nuclear plants nearby. Beneath our feet, hundreds or perhaps thousands of meters down, who knows how many tunnels and caverns lie hidden, burying the stories of whole lives.

2011-01-06 11:31 We were driving north along the Chengdu-Mianyang provincial road, and the road conditions were terrible. Every so often there would be shell craters one or two meters wide yawning up in front of us. At the crossroads of a deserted town, we spotted from afar a yellow pickup parked by the roadside with an orange warning beacon on top, the sort normally used by electric-repair crews. Three men were squatting beside it. When they saw our cars, they stood and waved. PL’s Grand Cherokee was in front, and when he stopped I had no choice but to brake as well. I did not get out.

2011-01-06 11:31 They seemed to want a ride, and PL refused them. The three men lingered by PL’s window trying to wear him down, while one of them slowly edged around toward the driver’s side. They looked as though they had weapons tucked away somewhere, and I was just starting to feel that something was very wrong when Rabbit, of all people, climbed out of the Range Rover behind us and lit a cigarette. The three men immediately closed in on the Range Rover. Rabbit tried to get back inside, but a club came down on his head and dropped him instantly. Damn it, they’re trying to take the car.

2011-01-06 12:01 For the first time I discovered that Blade lives up to his name. His fighting ability is terrifying. With one thrust of a jungle knife he drove the man who had climbed into the driver’s seat straight back out. Old Ma and I both jumped from our vehicles with weapons in hand, and the other two attackers turned and ran. The man who’d been stabbed convulsed a few times and then stopped moving. Blood sprayed all over the dashboard. This should count as self-defense, I told myself, though sadly there is no more 110 for me to call.

2011-01-06 12:01 Rabbit seems to be basically all right. He has a huge lump on his forehead and is sitting on the ground resting. The bigger problem is the man who got knifed. When Old Ma and PL dragged him toward the roadside, they found that his left hand had already calcified, with an extra bony spur sticking out where a little finger might have been. So this was someone who had eaten contaminated plants. Burning the body would have been too wasteful, so we piled stones and weeds over him as best we could and drove on.

2011-01-06 13:50 Rabbit is injured after all, so Blade has taken over driving his car while Rabbit lies in the back seat. Blade drives like a maniac. In a matter of moments he had pulled so far ahead that we lost sight of him entirely. Across the wasted fields, we could see the Chengdu-Mianyang Expressway running parallel to us about a kilometer away, with hundreds of people trudging slowly along it under their luggage. I called the Land Rover over the radio, and Blade answered that they had found supplies and were waiting for us in the town ahead.

2011-01-07 08:25 We spent the third night since departure in a small town. Strictly speaking, though, it wasn’t a town at all, but a logistics post that Blade discovered by taking a wrong turn at noon yesterday. Camouflage barracks stand interspersed among gray-brick houses. Since arriving here, our radios and electronic devices have all been subjected to heavy interference, and I’ve lost the records I’d kept over the past few days. The interference comes in on a pattern, once every two hours. I suspect we’re still somewhere above a nuclear base.

2011-01-07 10:34 Last night all I knew was that it had been raining. At dawn I found a skin of ice on the utility poles and tree branches. Quite a few of the few trees along the field ridges had come down. The Tiggo wouldn’t start this morning and has been idling to warm up ever since. Several of us, wearing gloves, carefully cleared branches from the road ahead. Rabbit slept through the night. The swelling on his head from yesterday has gone down, but he’s somehow started running a low fever. I’m the only one carrying a proper medical kit, so I found him some medicine.

2011-01-07 17:07 We reached Mianyang shortly after lunch today. From a distance it looked just like Chengdu, a lime-gray forest breathing black smoke. We had planned to continue north along the Chengdu-Mianyang Expressway, but at the Qing’an ferry crossing on the Anchang River we were stopped by soldiers and police. These troops, wearing a trefoil insignia I had never seen before, didn’t check immunity certificates. Instead they ordered us to proceed to a waiting zone marked out along Mianxing North Road in Mianyang’s western suburbs and remain there until transport could be moved onward under unified traffic control.

2011-01-07 22:24 The people maintaining order inside the waiting zone are, for the first time in a long while, actual police officers. There are even a few men in urban-enforcement uniforms wearing armbands that say “Patrol.” One police officer with two stars on his shoulders tried to make us leave our cars in a temporary lot and move into the prefab dormitories, but we refused in no uncertain terms. This waiting zone in the western suburbs holds several hundred vehicles and perhaps two or three thousand people. Everywhere I look I see either guarded suspicion or outright ill intent. I’ve realized that the open wilds are safer after all.

2011-01-07 23:47 We’ve tried talking with the people around us. Most are from nearby counties and small towns. The longest any of them has already been waiting here is three days. Military trains are running back and forth between Mianyang and Baoji, but only two cars on each train are allowed to carry civilians. The police here are SWAT units transferred up from Yibin. The ordinary police structure has already ceased to function. I also spotted those snow-camouflage biological epidemic-prevention troops again, offering free health checks inside the lines. Almost without thinking, I warned everyone not to take any pills they hand out.

2011-01-08 09:09 At dawn I woke to the sound of something tapping against the glass. A cluster of children stood outside, each holding an empty mineral-water bottle and staring at us through the window with pleading eyes. I was about to look for a half-finished bottle to give them when I caught sight, in the corner of my eye, of several grown men standing farther off. They were obviously using the children to do their asking for them. So I waved no and lay back down. The children left unwillingly. A moment later I heard several harsh metallic scraping sounds, jumped out of the car, and found deep fresh gouges already carved into the door.

2011-01-09 12:51 During the thirty-six hours we’ve spent in the waiting zone, dozens more vehicles have kept arriving behind us. Among them, unmistakably, was our neighbors’ Hummer H5, only now it was being driven by several strangers. In two days I’ve heard train whistles sound ten times, and fewer than a thousand people have been taken away. A porridge shed has been set up by the river, and many families short on supplies have been queueing there. I went over last night to look. It turned out to be coarse rice gruel boiled with a few leaves thrown in, so I did not dare eat it.

2011-01-09 12:57 Rabbit has now been running a low fever for three days. He has very little energy and stays in a daze most of the time. I suspect tetanus, but Rabbit has no visible wound anywhere. I went to the police on duty to ask for help and was told there were no doctors and no medical station. So we’ve tucked Rabbit into a sleeping bag, dosed him with antipyretics, and kept him asleep in the car. In the meantime those children begging for water have come back twice more, and Blade chased them off without the slightest hesitation by pulling a knife on them. I told him to keep a lower profile.

2011-01-09 13:29 A policeman finally came over just now to inform us that our three vehicles could go up onto the expressway, but Old Ma’s Tiggo was being denied passage. Naturally we refused to accept that and demanded to know why they were splitting up the convoy. The police explanation was that the Tiggo’s poor condition made it likely to cause a traffic jam on the highway. Blade, characteristically direct, said that when it’s time to part, you part, and opportunity shouldn’t be missed. PL, on the other hand, hesitated over whether we really ought to abandon them. I saw something odd in it at once: why had they skipped all the vehicles ahead of us and come straight to ours?

2011-01-09 13:31 Once I pointed it out, the others noticed it too. The only people around us packing up and starting engines were all driving large SUVs, Land Rovers and Hummers and the like, with ample stores and luggage lashed to their roofs. The ordinary family sedans around them showed no sign of movement at all. The expressway is really just a cage. Once you go in, you don’t come back out. After a brief discussion, we refused the offer on the grounds that we had a patient who could not be moved and chose to keep waiting. The policeman left swearing under his breath.

2011-01-09 21:49 Rabbit started convulsing tonight and drew his head down into the sleeping bag, refusing to come out. We stripped off his clothes to examine him and finally found a wound no larger than a fingernail on the back of his neck. It must have been scraped by a splinter sticking out of the club that hit him. None of us knew what to do. Rabbit’s wife kept crying without pause. Old Ma and I went car to car asking whether anyone was a doctor, but no one would respond. Sanitation in the waiting zone is poor, and my wife isn’t doing well either.

2011-01-10 09:02 First thing this morning we were hit by an armed SWAT vehicle search. Good thing my steel crossbow had been disassembled. Last night there was an incident in which police and urban-enforcement officers were killed, five or six dead in total. People are comparing it to the gang years ago that hacked off hands, except this time it was feet. Supposedly the trigger was that those officers were openly washing their feet in bottled mineral water inside the duty office. In extraordinary times, even if the moral order has not yet fully collapsed, anyone who still acts according to old habits is not far from death.

2011-01-10 10:49 Heavy snow has started falling outside. In truth the accumulation isn’t great, but the flakes are large and thick. Rabbit has sunk into sleep. He hasn’t eaten a grain of food in more than ten hours now, though his fever does seem to have broken. Those SWAT men this morning may have been fierce, but at least they kept to the rules, unlike the police, who are always pocketing whatever they can. The expressway that had just reopened to part of the traffic yesterday has now been closed again. We can’t sit here waiting like fools any longer. We need to find a way out of the waiting zone.

2011-01-11 00:01 After the SWAT teams pulled out this afternoon, the police became noticeably harsher. Worse still, they handed firearms to some of the urban-enforcement officers. There have already been several bursts of gunfire tonight. In a waiting zone this large, the police presence is actually quite thin, while the army is deployed out on the main roads. In other words, their original intent was probably never to imprison us here at all. They really were trying to divert people, or hold them for something. Rabbit has actually woken up, incredibly enough.

2011-01-11 00:12 Over the past two days the heavy electronic interference has cropped up several more times. I keep a little compass ball on my dashboard, and once I saw it spinning continuously. After dark, beneath the blue-gray dome of sky, you could see the glow of city lights reflecting off the clouds on the far side of town. There are visibly more lights in the surrounding suburbs than there ever were around Chengdu. Yet those lights flicker like the indicators on cold electrical cabinets. They carry no trace of human presence at all.

2011-01-11 00:14 Rabbit ate a piece of cured pork tonight, drank a great deal of water, and gradually became talkative again. He seems to be recovering. We’ve also discovered that these police and urban-enforcement patrols are not being carried out on any strict schedule. If we don’t get freezing rain or snow tonight, we’ll take the risk and leave the waiting zone. Just as you can’t keep your car idling at the roadside forever waiting for someone, we have to keep moving forward, keep changing position, if we want to find any better chance of survival.

2011-01-11 10:17 We left the waiting zone at three in the morning and, after driving for nearly an hour and a half, stopped here. According to GLONASS, this place is called Барабан Город. Once the sky cleared in the morning, it became obvious that this was less a town than some kind of prehistoric ruin. Broken walls ran along the ridge, and Qiang stockades built from flagstones were overgrown with gray dead vines. We have reached the rim of the Chengdu Basin.

2011-01-11 10:20 The riot in the waiting zone last night began when soldiers and police at the expressway entrance started digging an isolation trench, which meant the road north was about to be severed for good. The crowd broke through the cordon and scattered blindly in every direction. In the confusion, urban-enforcement officers fired warning shots, which only triggered still greater chaos. One driver rammed his car into the police and was shot dead, after which more people surged over the peaked caps with wheels and fists. We drove with only our parking lights on, heading northwest.

2011-01-11 12:06 Deep inside the Qiang stockade we saw local residents in black clothing moving about with blank expressions. We didn’t dare enter the village and kept going instead. If all goes well, we should reach Qingchuan this afternoon. I’ve driven this road many times before and remember it as lush and thick with vegetation. Now it looks as bleak as the far north. The dead branches stand like talismans warning us not to come closer. More than a dozen vehicles followed us out last night, and that H5 was unmistakably among them.

2011-01-11 18:00 I may have taken the wrong road. Ahead of us the route has degenerated into a single-lane gravel track. On the left runs a narrow river; on the right the mountain presses close at the shoulder. We agreed that if we come upon a sizable town ahead, we’ll stop there to rest. The fuel gauge is already past halfway down. At lunch, the vehicles trailing behind us also stopped, and several of their drivers came over to make conversation and ask where we were headed. We told them Lanzhou, but refused to let them join the convoy. Resources are limited.

2011-01-11 22:58 The temperature swing between day and night is severe in the mountains. With the heater running inside the car it feels pleasantly warm, but if you step out to piss and the wind hits you, your head starts to spin. It’s nearly eleven o’clock, and we’ve passed only two villages. Most of the farmhouses with black-tiled roofs still have lights on. Many villagers evidently never evacuated. Perhaps they have no idea what is happening out in the wider world, no sense that famine has already arrived. All they know is that overnight the rapeseed in their fields died, and they are left grieving and bewildered by it.

2011-01-12 00:22 The Tiggo got bogged down in a stretch of loose gravel. I hauled it out with the steel tow cable, but in the middle of the night I didn’t dare keep pushing forward, so we doubled back and returned to the little village we had passed half an hour earlier. Some of the vehicles trailing us had already stopped there; others followed us back in. Blade went to a villager’s house and bought several jin of cured sausage. Amazingly, the people here still accept cash. Many of the drivers would gladly have bought out every scrap of meat in the village.

2011-01-12 08:36 In the middle of the night I heard people retching, PL among them. It turns out the rabbit they bought and roasted last night was actually rat. It ate like dry twigs, hard and stringy, with knotty bits in it. Old Ma climbed the slope beside us and managed to find a flicker of GPS signal. He marked a gas station forty kilometers away. We have to find some way to shake the vehicles following us. Otherwise, once fuel comes into the picture, there will likely be a fight with weapons.

2011-01-12 10:35 We left in a hurry just now, and PL dropped a bag containing his ID card and some cash. He doesn’t intend to go back for it. No cars came after us. Blade said over the radio that last night he had done a little work on the exhaust pipes of those trailing vehicles. We found the gas station, one of those increasingly rare private ones, and it had only 90-octane fuel. We siphoned it straight out of underground barrels and filled the auxiliary tanks. Just as we were about to leave, the H5 rolled in.

2011-01-12 11:06 A bald man got out of the H5. He had an Arab scarf wrapped around his neck so that only his Ray-Bans showed, his hands were bundled up tight, and he walked with a slight limp. He nodded to us, then simply picked up the fuel hose from the ground. The Hummer’s windows were all blacked out, so there was no way to tell how many people were inside. We didn’t linger. We got back in the cars and left. Running 90-octane will be rough on the injectors. Let’s hope nothing serious goes wrong.

2011-01-12 11:48 Today’s road keeps climbing higher and higher. Judging from the GPS, we’ve probably gone the wrong way. We’re now on a branch route toward Pingwu, and if we keep going we’ll end up in Jiuzhaigou. The Chengdu-Lanzhou railway has been in service for years now, but the Chengdu-Lanzhou expressway was never built. The question is whether to turn back or keep going. This road is at too high an altitude, and our vehicles are in too poor shape. If one of them breaks down halfway up, things will get interesting fast.

2011-01-12 21:19 My wife and I have both come down with something like a cold, so we stopped early tonight by a river to rest. After basic filtering, the river water is usable. This afternoon we did keep heading toward Jiuzhaigou. If we don’t stop, we should reach the scenic area by eleven tonight. The deeper we go into the mountains, the more shocking the landscape becomes: gray-white forests, wide drifts of dead birds. Far off in the hills, we can see wildfires flickering.

2011-01-12 23:52 I’m sleeping worse and worse these days, and my lower back has started aching. Tonight everyone was chatting over the radio on and off, and I handed out some vitamin capsules and cod-liver oil. Symptoms from the lack of plant-based food will only become more obvious from here on. Old Ma’s car has started stalling frequently. My guess is the throttle body is fouled up. Once it’s daylight, we’ll clean it properly. Rabbit has recovered completely now. Blade, on the other hand, has grown even more taciturn.

2011-01-13 08:43 The air in the mountains is alarmingly damp. The windows were filmed over with mist and a skim of ice. I got up early, started the engine, and let it warm slowly. Last night I showed them how to stretch plastic sheeting across the roofs of the cars to collect dew. We are not yet out of water, but planning ahead never hurts. I feel somewhat better after sleeping. My wife has a bit of a cough. The sky is a bright tile blue. In the mountains you get the illusion that the air must be clean, and yet there isn’t a single birdcall to be heard. We started repairing the Tiggo.

2011-01-13 10:49 After all of us crawled over Old Ma’s Tiggo and did our best to fix it, the engine at least stopped dying at idle, but now the check-engine light on the dashboard is glowing steadily. We dug through the owner’s manual for ages, and it says this may simply mean the engine hasn’t completed its self-check, nothing too serious. So we have no real choice except to make do and get back on the road. I joked that if his car gave out, he could always squeeze into mine. He forced a smile and said it’d be fine. Out of the four families, his is the only one traveling with a child.

2011-01-14 12:08 Yesterday we struggled forward for a little over a hundred kilometers and then found there was simply no road left. It had been blown apart. The plastic caps and fuse wire from blasting detonators were still lying on the ground, so it must have happened recently. With no choice, we turned around to look for another route. On the flat highway through Zoige, PL, who was leading, rolled his car without any warning at all. The Grand Cherokee flipped several times and went off the roadbed. His girlfriend was gone almost at once. He, impossibly, survived.

2011-01-14 12:11 The rollover happened because the right front tire suddenly burst. Years ago my father went through the exact same kind of crash. We spent the entire day dealing with the site. No rescuers were ever going to come. We could only stand there and watch that beautiful girl gradually stop breathing. Her surname was Wu. We had only played tabletop games together a few times, but PL had cared for her with extraordinary tenderness all along the journey. We had even joked that they would be the only couple to get married in the middle of this great famine.

2011-01-14 12:12 We tried several times to flip the Grand Cherokee back over and finally had to give up. PL’s supplies were split between my car and Old Ma’s. He himself is lying in my car now. His left arm has been roughly splinted with a wooden board, and even twisting his waist is difficult. All we can do is hope there is no internal injury. Fortunately, over the past twenty hours PL has been tough. His vital signs have remained stable. In Zoige, mani-stone cairns are already everywhere in sight. We buried the girl at the foot of a mountain.

2011-01-14 17:06 We stopped at the junction of Highway G213 and some unnamed river to rest and regroup. PL’s condition is still unstable, and he hasn’t recovered from the shock of losing his girlfriend. We reviewed our supplies and decided to stay here an extra day. At least the weather has turned warmer. I spread out the solar panels by the roadside to charge devices for everyone. Old Ma even has a solar cooker, a miraculous thing he used for boiling water back when he was stationed in Tibet.

2011-01-16 00:01 This morning we picked up a radio signal saying there was a supply post in Zoige county town for vehicles traveling the Chengdu-Lanzhou route. PL was doing a little better, so we drove there slowly. Just as we caught sight of the county theater building in the distance, a car suddenly started honking at us. Looking over, we saw the H5 stopped at the mouth of a side street. The bald man leaned out of the window and shouted at us not to go in. It’s a trap the soldiers set, he yelled.

2011-01-16 00:32 The bald man’s voice sounded strange, as if his vocal cords had been damaged. He said the garrison along this line had already been pulled out, that he’d seen the same unit designation back in Mianyang. The people using the radio now, he said, were merely local villagers trying to lure in vehicles and food. I half believed him and half didn’t, but it seemed wiser to assume he might be right. In any case, staying out of the county seat was obviously safer. I was about to ask him where he was from when he rolled up the window, turned around, and drove off.

2011-01-16 00:51 We kept heading north along G213, deeper into southern Gansu. This route was never exactly remote, and now, though there are no people in sight, abandoned cars and scattered luggage are everywhere. Every time we come across a vehicle, we stop to see whether there is any fuel left in it or anything else worth taking. Blade has been trying to find another car that still runs, so he and his wife can separate from Rabbit’s vehicle, but so far he hasn’t found one.

2011-01-16 11:22 We set out early today and passed several abandoned pickups that looked from a distance as if they were loaded with straw. Only when we got close did we see that the truck beds were piled with corpses wrapped in blankets, with needle-like vines piercing through the fabric and trailing down over the side. We accelerated away as if fleeing the plague itself. Almost without noticing it, we realized the landscape by the roadside had already changed. Bare yellow-brown hills, and a sky that had somehow grown higher.

2011-01-16 12:15 Blade, bringing up the rear, suddenly came over the radio shouting that several Tucsons were chasing us. In my rearview mirror I could see thick yellow dust rising from the road about a kilometer behind. On a surface like this there is no way to accelerate enough to shake a pursuit, and besides, there wasn’t yet any clear sign that they were actually after us. So everyone kept driving as normal. Tucsons were once a favorite model of car thieves years ago. Insurance companies wouldn’t even cover theft on them. A lot of stolen ones ended up resold into pastoral regions.

2011-01-16 12:57 Three battered Tucson SUVs caught up from behind just now, and two of them swerved ahead and forced us to a stop. Seven or eight Khampa men with matted braids got out, waving Tibetan knives and ordering us out of the vehicles. I told my wife to stay in the car and not move, then slowly climbed out holding the steel crossbow. Blade, however, opened fire and dropped two of the robbers before they had any chance at all. Where did he get a gun? None of us even knew he had one.

2011-01-16 13:08 Blade calmly explained that he had grabbed the gun off an urban-enforcement officer during the chaos when we left the Mianyang waiting zone, though unfortunately the magazines weren’t full and he had only ten rounds. The rest of us were drenched in cold sweat. Knives and pepper spray are no longer enough to guarantee safety. We tightened the spacing between the vehicles so we could support one another front and back. The Tucsons still trailed us at a distance, and men even leaned out of their windows hurling stones at us with wurduo slings.

2011-01-16 14:54 Under the robbers’ harassment, our convoy nearly got into trouble several times, and the Range Rover at the rear was dented in multiple places by the stones. Blade dared not waste ammunition, so all he could do was let them keep shadowing us. Only when we reached another town did the Tucsons finally turn away. Long before we reached that town, the wind brought us the smell of mutton soup. This place actually had a real military supply post, and a squad of PAP soldiers was still holding it.

2011-01-16 17:24 This little town is called Huage, the gateway to Luqu County. We have crossed into Gansu. The soldiers here belong to the forest PAP. A few days ago the trees up in the mountains all began to wither, so they withdrew from above and discovered that the county seat had already been abandoned. The squad leader is named Caidan, a local Tibetan. He has gathered the sheep that local farmers had penned and is holding position here on the banks of the Tao River. He told us that quite a few vehicles have passed through over the past few days.

2011-01-16 17:42 The soldiers invited us to rest and served up steaming bowls of mutton soup. I made a point of going to inspect the sheep they had slaughtered and the hides they had skinned off them before finally settling down and eating with full confidence. These few soldiers all seem to be in good spirits, the kind that make you think of those military dramas on television. I asked why they had not evacuated with everyone else. Caidan said simply that this is his home and he has nowhere else to go. The other soldiers just grinned and laughed. I don’t think the story is that simple.

2011-01-16 18:07 Taking advantage of a trip out to piss, Blade quietly asked me something. If these soldiers really had been holding the riverbank, why did we run into them here instead of in the county seat? If they can eat the sheep, then what have those sheep been eating? We called out to Old Ma and said we were heading into town to look for parts to repair the Tiggo. Caidan gave a sweeping wave of the hand and said there were plenty of vehicles in the county seat, even PAP Dongfeng Warriors, and that we were welcome to drive whatever we needed. That took us by surprise.

2011-01-16 18:37 Luqu was also a hard-hit area during the May 12 Wenchuan earthquake that year. A great many buildings collapsed, so the place was effectively rebuilt from scratch. Yet when we entered the county seat, we found dangerous buildings everywhere, and not because of those gray-white vines. These were genuinely unsafe structures. Cracks three fingers wide were everywhere. Houses leaned and sagged, somehow still standing. When the dry cold wind passed through, every fissure gave out a thin mournful sound.

2011-01-16 18:38 Xiulong Zhaxi Square was packed with cars dusted over in yellow sand, many of them still carrying Sichuan A and Sichuan B plates. I asked one of the soldiers where the people from those cars had gone. He said that before the 10th, the Qinghai Military District had been sending helicopters here every day to evacuate people to Xunhua. After that, because of the weather, the landing zone was moved to Yanglong, a place no vehicle could reach, so many people set out there on foot. I asked whether helicopters were still coming now. If they were, the soldier said, we’d have been gone already.

2011-01-16 21:12 Caidan invited us to spend the night at the supply post. I didn’t really want to stay too close to the PAP, but then I thought about the alternative, running into knife-carrying bandits in the empty county seat after dark, and in the end I called everyone over and had us camp on the road right outside the post. The Tao River is beautiful at night, a blue ribbon winding among the rolling pastures. Those PAP men are all remarkably bold. They gathered dead branches and built a bonfire. It’s the first time in days I’ve sat close to a fire. The warmth feels incredible.

2011-01-17 10:14 Two shots rang out last night. The soldier on duty told us they had been driving off wolves approaching the town. When I got up in the morning, I could catch the faint smell of blood froth in the wind. We packed up and got ready to continue on the road. Caidan generously handed us the key to a Dongfeng Warrior, then made a request we couldn’t refuse: stay one more day. He said that the last time they received radio contact, they were told that today would see the final helicopter sortie.

2011-01-17 13:34 We set out for Yanglong at eleven. Just in case, I went with Old Ma, Rabbit, and Caidan’s group, while Blade and PL stayed to guard the vehicles and keep radio contact with us. Halfway there, heavy snow suddenly began to fall. In only a few minutes the whole world around us had turned into a white plain, and visibility shrank to little more than ten meters. We had no choice but to turn back. So much for the helicopter. Caidan was even more upset than I was. He said that with snow this heavy, the livestock they had left would never make it through.

2011-01-17 14:04 We had been walking for an hour before the weather changed on the way out, and now, on the way back, we had already been going for two hours and still hadn’t reached Huage again. We couldn’t even see a trace of Luqu. Yet Caidan kept trudging on without a sign of concern. Where exactly is he taking us? I pulled out my compass and sure enough, we had veered a full thirty degrees southwest of the proper heading. I called Caidan to a stop. He looked distinctly uncomfortable and muttered that with snow this heavy, this was the lee-side route.

2011-01-17 21:37 We got back to Huage at four in the afternoon. By then all the snow on us had melted, leaving us wet and freezing. Caidan said nothing more along the way, and I couldn’t quite tease out what was wrong. At the gate of the supply post, two green military vehicles had appeared as if from nowhere: one big Tiema truck and one Iveco, both marked with red crosses. When I saw my wife, they were roasting mutton shanks over the fire. The sight of our people and cars safe and intact let all of us breathe again.

2011-01-17 21:38 Several unfamiliar soldiers were also warming themselves by the fire. When they saw us come in, they stood up and greeted us warmly. Caidan is only a deputy platoon leader, and he hurried up to salute them. The newcomers told him not to stand on ceremony and introduced themselves as being from some brigade out of Guangyuan. At that, something thudded in my chest. Their shoulder insignia looked horribly familiar: the figure of a soldier in a helmet holding a stalk of wheat. Weren’t these the same biological epidemic-prevention troops that had appeared in my residential compound? What are they doing all the way out here?

2011-01-17 23:31 Tonight I drank a few liang of barley liquor, and after the wind and snow I was light-headed the whole time, half asleep in the car. PL seemed much recovered and was even in the mood to play grab-the-totem games with those soldiers. There are only four of the new arrivals in all: two drivers and two lieutenant-looking officers. The officers were carrying flashlights and collecting grass seeds out in the fields. The rear compartment of the Tiema truck is completely empty, though it does have small windows in it. I have no idea what it’s for.

2011-01-17 23:51 The two officers are surnamed Mo and Zhao. After they came back from gathering grass seeds, they sat around talking with Old Ma and the others while I propped up the radio and listened. One moment they were saying the government had announced a Green Dam plan to defend against the plant plague, the next they were saying experts from the Fourth Military Medical University had already succeeded in controlling the illness with medical isotopes. That made me think of my brother, who graduated from Fourth Military Med. It was on the eighteenth that he gave me that rushed phone call warning me. I wonder where he is now.

2011-01-18 08:32 My head is pounding. In the middle of the night someone suddenly dragged me out of the car and smashed me to the ground with a rifle butt. I clearly remember locking the door. Now I’m tied up and thrown into the back of that Tiema truck. My wife is here, Old Ma and the others too. The only ones missing are Blade and his wife. I have no idea where the truck is headed, but from the view through the little window it seems we’re climbing a mountain road. In the cab sits Lieutenant Mo, and damn it all, Caidan is right there beside him.

2011-01-18 08:53 It’s still sleeting today. The bastards somehow forgot to take off my EDC bag. Caidan must not be afraid of us escaping, because the ropes on us were only symbolic. One quick struggle and they came loose. I was still thinking through what to do when Old Ma’s son woke up and burst into tears. The Tiema slammed to a stop, the rear hatch opened, and Caidan climbed in with a dark face. He swept his eyes over us and said, “A soldier obeys orders. Forgive me. You won’t be mistreated.”

2011-01-18 09:40 A road marker flashed past outside, and it looked strangely familiar. I thought hard for a moment and then it hit me: isn’t this the same road we took yesterday toward Yanglong? That means Caidan and his men were probably stationed in Huage all along precisely to wait for small bands of travelers like us. But what value is there in capturing us? The other day he insisted no vehicles could get through to Yanglong, yet by the look of it this dirt road can run all the way to the airfield.

2011-01-18 11:32 A makeshift military airstrip came into view, really no more than a broad patch of flattened ground on the mountaintop, fit only for helicopters. A Mi-26, painted in snow camouflage, was parked there. The moment it saw us approaching, its enormous rotors began slowly to turn. The closer we drew, the more deafening the roar became. When the Tiema stopped, several soldiers hauled us out one by one and marched us toward the helicopter.

2011-01-18 11:43 I kept watching the distance between myself and my wife with absolute concentration. If anyone so much as tried to separate us, I was prepared to fight to the death. We were brought up through the rear hatch and ordered to sit on wooden crates on the cabin floor. The other Iveco was driven straight into the Mi-26. Lieutenant Zhao got out and spoke with a major already aboard the aircraft. After the two of them talked for a while, that major walked over toward us.

2011-01-18 11:56 Damn it, I know this bastard major. He’s Chaoye, one of my brother’s old dog-meat buddies, an officer with the Chengdu Military Region Joint Logistics Department. He recognized me too and stared in shock. How the hell did they bring you in here, he asked. Why are you still in Sichuan? Didn’t your brother tell you to run? I gave him the rough outline of what had happened, and he sighed. Caidan’s squad really had been ordered to set up a checkpoint in Luqu, he said, specifically to intercept convoys from Chengdu carrying sick people.

2011-01-18 11:57 I hurried to explain that our patient, PL, had been injured in a car wreck, not infected in Chengdu. Chaoye waved a hand and said one of your group is infected. Then he pointed over my shoulder. I turned around as slowly as I could, terrified he meant my wife. Following his finger, I saw Rabbit. In my head I replayed Rabbit’s attack, his fever, the fever breaking, his recovery, and then I remembered the man Blade had stabbed to death. Was that when it happened?

2011-01-18 12:16 Under the tremendous noise of the helicopter, Rabbit hadn’t heard any of our conversation. I asked Chaoye where they were taking us. He said there was a field hospital east of Mianyang where they were researching and treating the epidemic. That was where we had originally been meant to go, but… He didn’t finish the sentence. Through his headset, Chaoye told the pilot to stand down, and then he had us all taken back off the helicopter.

2011-01-18 13:17 In a field medical truck we were forcibly treated with an injection of the medical radioactive isotope technetium-919m. If it encounters the unknown bacteria from the meteorite gravel inside the body, it can slow the rewriting of DNA fragments. Rabbit was confirmed as infected. He belongs to the third generation of transmission, is no longer contagious, but still has to be placed under centralized observation and treatment. Rabbit himself took it calmly enough. His wife, on the other hand, cried herself to pieces.

2011-01-18 14:00 Chaoye said the rest of us had been cleared of infection and did not have to go back with them to Mianyang. Though it had troops and hospitals, he said, it was even more dangerous there. Rabbit and his wife boarded the helicopter. With remarkable nonchalance, he said that would leave the Range Rover cheap for PL to inherit. We watched the Mi-26 lift into the air, not knowing what would become of Rabbit and not knowing where my brother was now. I asked Chaoye about him, but he said the air-force medical team had been pulled to the very front line, and someone of his rank was not privy to transfer details.

2011-01-18 15:07 Riding back in the Tiema truck, Caidan kept apologizing to us over and over, saying military orders are hard to disobey. That much is true; I can’t really blame him. He told us that the moment we arrived and said we had come from Chengdu, he had already sent a telegram to the Mianyang side. Before us, several hundred people had already been transported back. I asked what happened to those taken back there. He shrugged, thought for a long time, and finally said it would be better not to go to that damned place.

2011-01-18 16:04 Caidan said that when they came to seize us at midnight yesterday, Blade and his wife were already gone from the vehicles. He really is alert. By the time we got back, Huage village was now being held by another relief guard squad. Our cars and baggage ought still to be there. I mentioned the Tibetan bandits we ran into on the road. Caidan said that was perfectly normal, but what can anyone do? They need to survive too. He also said that this checkpoint would be withdrawn by the end of the month at the latest, because soon no one would be able to get out of Sichuan anymore.

2011-01-18 18:07 From a distance, the low buildings of the supply post already looked wrong. There were no sentries visible outside. When the Tiema pulled up to the yard entrance, we could see through the open gate that several corpses were sprawled all over the ground inside, some soldiers, some herders. Our vehicles were all still there. The luggage had been rifled through, and the food and water had been pulled out and piled together, as if whoever did it had not had time to carry them off.

2011-01-18 18:07 Blade’s body wasn’t among the dead. One of the herders, however, looked oddly familiar, as if he had been in one of those Tucsons the other day, and the corpse was still giving off heat. Caidan recognized the captain of the replacement guard squad lying in a pool of blood, but his submachine gun was gone. I pulled our radio from the car and called for Blade, but there was no answer at all. Maybe he had slipped away in the night and never gone through the firefight that had just happened here.

2011-01-18 21:35 By the time we had collected and arranged the dead, it was already very late. We lit the bonfire again, boiled a pot of mutton soup, and sat out in the yard to eat. The thought that a vicious battle had just taken place in this very courtyard left me badly on edge. At this point we are down to six people: my wife and me, Old Ma’s family of three, and PL. Tomorrow we have two options: head for the prefectural capital of Gannan, or enter Qinghai. Caidan recommends the latter. Gannan is chaos, he says.

2011-01-18 22:15 The radio in the car suddenly began to hiss. Blade had seen the bonfire at the supply post and was testing the channel. Once he confirmed it was us, he came back not long afterward, dragging his wife behind him, both of them covered in dust. The night before, they had discovered Caidan’s intentions and fled to a nearby hillside. They originally meant to come back at noon and drive off while no one was around, only to run into raiders taking advantage of the emptiness and fighting with the replacement guard squad. Carrying nothing but emergency bags, he didn’t dare go far, so they hid nearby instead.

2011-01-18 22:33 I told Blade about Rabbit. He jerked all over when he heard it, visibly shocked. I noticed blood on his clothes. He said it had splashed onto him while he was grabbing bags back during the daytime, not his own. We prepared to sort out our gear overnight and leave first thing in the morning. PL handed Blade the keys to Rabbit’s car, since he and his wife had been riding in the Range Rover all along. Blade refused, though, and he and his wife moved their luggage onto the Dongfeng Warrior Caidan had given us.

2011-01-19 08:52 When we got up this morning, a night’s snow had fallen outside. The layer in front of the door was a full four centimeters thick. Fortunately the accumulation on the highway was much lighter, just a thin covering blown flat by the wind. But if a real blizzard hits while we’re halfway along the road, we’ll be trapped with nowhere to advance or retreat. We stripped snow chains off an idle military vehicle and fitted them to our cars. Old Ma’s Tiggo is such a wreck, yet he still couldn’t bear to part with it. After I talked him into it, he finally switched to a Ford Kuga in decent condition.

2011-01-19 10:18 Just before we set out, Caidan said that since no one was checking equipment anymore anyway, he might as well give us two Type 92 pistols and a small amount of ammunition. PL and I each took one. Blade wanted a submachine gun too, but he was turned down. Yesterday Old Ma picked up a wurduo sling from one of the dead, and Caidan showed us how to use it, though getting any accuracy out of the thing is no easy matter. The Warrior runs on diesel. We topped off in Luqu and then got back on the road.

2011-01-19 10:18 Our overall situation at the moment is this: eight people, namely myself, my wife, Old Ma’s family of three including his seven-year-old son, Blade and his wife, and PL. Four vehicles: the Wrangler, the Kuga, the Range Rover, and the Warrior. Water: sufficient. Food: canned goods, frozen mutton, cured pork. From Luqu to Xunhua, taking Provincial Road 312 and avoiding Gannan proper, is close to three hundred kilometers. Fortunately the elevation changes aren’t too severe. If our luck doesn’t turn completely rotten, it shouldn’t be too bad.

2011-01-19 20:23 The cold is getting worse and the snow still hasn’t stopped. My wife and I have put on every layer of clothing we have, and when we pause on the road we don’t even dare shut off the engine. We barely managed to reach Provincial Road 312 before the Range Rover gave up completely. Rabbit, that idiot, had never switched to winter engine oil, so once the temperature dropped below minus twenty Celsius the thing simply died for good. We didn’t dare wait around in the snow, so we abandoned it and switched vehicles. That cost us a fair bit of time. At this point we’re still thirty kilometers from Sangke Township.

2011-01-19 21:09 The wind and snow suddenly turned much fiercer. Even with the high beams on, you could see only a few meters ahead. We were already crawling slowly, but even so several of the cars started sliding on the gentlest curves. After a quick discussion, we decided not to risk pushing on. The odds of freezing are still lower than the odds of dying in a wreck. We drove the three remaining cars down off the roadbed and parked them in an arc to block the wind, then set up camp. All of us have colds to one degree or another. Luckily, my wife and I have sleeping bags thick enough to matter.

2011-01-19 21:16 Old Ma was boiling strong coffee for his son and asked whether I wanted some. Truth is, what I really miss right now is ginger soup, especially the kind made thick and sweet with brown sugar. But does ginger even still exist in this world? Ever since we saw Caidan and his men build fires with deadwood in Luqu and come to no harm, we’ve finally begun to trust firewood ourselves. Before that, our fear of plants had gotten so deep that we didn’t even dare touch dead branches. Blade says his hands were frostbitten last night. He kept his gloves on even while eating.

2011-01-20 08:50 The wind got to me when I went out to relieve myself last night. I started running a fever in the middle of the night, tossing and turning, unable to sleep, sweating through one strange dream after another until even the sleeping bag was damp. This morning I swallowed another handful of medicine and started warming up the car. We’ll get back on the road in a bit. My wife says my face looks awful and insists she’ll drive for now. Blade pointed at the roadside and said that some kind of animal came through in the night. In the snow there were clear strings of hoofprints.

2011-01-20 17:47 The fever still won’t break, and every time I cough it feels as if my entire lungs are tearing. So this is how I go down. Ironic. Today we made it as far as Sangke, where we had meant to arrive yesterday, and there we stopped. The next stretch ahead will be hard, with several mountain crossings in a row, so everyone made the considerate decision to rest a day and wait for my cold to ease before moving on. Sangke is scattered across seven or eight villages. You can vaguely tell that people are still living there, but when they spot us from far off, they all duck away.

2011-01-20 18:06 We picked an empty courtyard and made camp there. Presumably the former owners won’t object if we use their stove for a while. When Blade and PL went out to gather firewood, they ran into a child dressed in black. The moment the child saw them, he turned and ran. The running gait was strange, almost unnatural, and they couldn’t catch up. Over these past few days PL has recovered a great deal psychologically, though he still drifts off in a daze from time to time. Because of the cold I don’t dare eat mutton, so I mixed up some oatmeal and crawled into my sleeping bag early.

2011-01-21 17:09 The fever kept on. I lay in the sleeping bag drifting in and out, aching all over, barely able to lift an arm. My wife fed me dissolving fever tablets. God, I wanted a can of yellow peaches. When I was little, whenever I got sick my mother would buy me canned fruit, and once I ate it I always got better. Old Ma and the others all looked deeply anxious. Ironically, it was Blade, the most hardline of us all, who kept watching me this time with an unexpectedly gentle gaze.

2011-01-22 10:09 After more than forty hours of fitful sleep, I finally got some strength back into my body. That brought up a practical problem: toilet paper, that absolute consumable, is vanishing much faster than I’d expected. If we end up with even one more patient as sick with a bad cold as I was, we’ll soon be saying goodbye to one of the last signs of civilized society. My wife spooned instant rice porridge into me. Seeing that I looked a little better, she carefully told me that Old Ma and the others were no longer willing to wait. At first light, they’d already left.

2011-01-22 10:10 I was shocked and demanded to know why. My wife said, don’t you remember Rabbit? At once I recalled Rabbit’s fever the other week. Did they think I was infected too? Impossible. Or perhaps that was only the excuse they chose to cover the fact that they no longer wanted to wait. I let out a long sigh and flopped heavily back down, only then noticing that the Warrior was still parked beside the Wrangler. Blade hadn’t left? No, my wife said. If not for him, all our things would already have been stolen.

2011-01-22 10:43 Blade was out in the open space tinkering with my solar panels. Hearing us talk, he wandered over. So now I finally know the warmth and chill of human nature, I said with a bitter laugh. In truth I’d never been especially close to Blade before, and I had no idea why he had chosen to stay for me. He didn’t answer that. Instead he asked very seriously: that day, when you spoke to that Major Chao, was he certain that third-generation infected people are no longer contagious? I said yes. And all of you were injected with the isotope? Yes.

2011-01-22 10:44 Blade nodded and slowly pulled off his gloves. On the backs of his hands were several faint swellings, like steel shot implanted under the skin. Blade himself has no idea when he was infected. Only the deep bone-gnawing pain that comes in the dead of night reminds him that he is no longer like the others. You’re a sensible man, Blade said. I could tell that much long ago. If my wife stays with you, she’ll live longer. When he spoke of his wife, his eyes were full of tenderness.

2011-01-24 15:47 We have somehow lingered in Sangke for five full days now. Far too long. By yesterday afternoon I was at least able to get up and walk around, though the violent coughing was still with me. My wife was afraid that driving all night would make the illness flare up again, so we stayed one more night. After dark, Blade came hurrying back from gathering firewood, stamped out the bonfire, and pulled out his phone to show us a video he had just shot: several villagers dressed in black were unloading things from a Ford Kuga. Old Ma’s car? I asked. Blade nodded.

2011-01-24 15:49 I asked where he had filmed it. Blade said it was in the next village over. We were stunned. Old Ma and PL’s cars, which had driven off two days ago, were practically within arm’s reach, and there were all those villagers who had never once shown themselves openly. The people in the video moved in a distinctly unnatural way. At such a short distance, they must have been watching us this whole time too. We decided that later on we’d scout out whether Old Ma and the others were still alive. First, though, we’d better check the condition of our own vehicles.

2011-01-25 09:44 I’m still trying to absorb what happened last night. In fact, the shock scared my cold clean away. I have spent the whole journey forcing myself not to believe that anything supernatural is happening around us, even though the apocalypse itself is already the most supernatural thing imaginable, and yet I still cannot digest what took place. The outcome is simple enough: we rescued Old Ma’s family of three and PL, regrouped as one party, and got back on the road. The price is that we now carry an even larger question on our backs.

2011-01-25 09:44 At dusk yesterday, just as Blade and I drew near the village where he had spotted the Kuga, a spring trap made of branches and ropes knocked us flat. We were tied up like sticky-rice dumplings, and several villagers in black grabbed us all at once and dragged us toward a farmhouse. Their hands were hard and cold, crusted with dried blood, and none of them had five normal fingers. In the confusion Blade shouted something in Tibetan. To my amazement, the villagers stopped. Blade speaks Tibetan?

2011-01-25 09:45 A little later an elderly man, black and thin like some village party secretary, was carried over. His two legs, well, could no longer really be called legs. He and Blade clasped hands, and the extra bony spur protruding between the old man’s index and middle fingers settled on the swellings on the back of Blade’s hand. The sight made my skin crawl. The two men didn’t speak. They simply held hands for five full minutes, and then we were released.

2011-01-25 09:46 We found Old Ma and the others in a woodshed. If we hadn’t come, sooner or later they would have been turned into some kind of cured meat. Old Ma kept trying to say something, but Blade cut him off with a wave: no point talking. Only if there are more people do you live long enough. We settled that clearly when we came out together; if you still can’t understand it, we can change people up ahead. I said nothing, partly to avoid making the moment more awkward.

2011-01-25 09:47 We set out on the road again, the eastern sky about to catch fire and light the right side of our faces. Blade’s vehicle took point, while Old Ma and PL followed behind in silence. I knew all of us now carried a knot inside that would be difficult to undo, but we had to do our best to preserve at least the surface of unity and keep moving. Beyond Blade’s strange exchange with the old man, there is an even larger question haunting me: just now Little Ma ran over and hugged me and said, they were driven out.

2011-01-26 08:50 Last night we camped beside a mountain road. It was the first time we’d ever spent the night in terrain this dangerous, though at least there was no chance of other vehicles passing by. We anchored the cars to the ground with tow lines, then each of us curled up inside our own vehicle, keeping our silence and our distance, while only static hissed over the radios. PL and Old Ma’s family of five must have been miserable squeezed into one car, forced to remain seated the whole time. The night wind was like an axe, carving the shape of cold itself.

2011-01-27 17:58 At last the hardest stretch of mountain road is behind us, and the road has begun descending for long intervals. The radio has actually picked up a signal again, a Qinghai traffic station. Before we came down off the heights, on cloudless nights we could see, far away, chains of headlights like dragons, rising and falling along the earth’s shadowed contours. We’re nearly out of fuel now. Once we’re off the mountain we need to find somewhere to refuel and patch tires. Supermarkets, gas stations, repair shops: those are the places you long to encounter most.

2011-01-29 23:34 Fifty hours. These past days of exhausting, monotonous travel have drained away even the will to record events. Within a radius of one hundred and fifty kilometers centered on Lanzhou, every road is choked with vehicles bearing plates from Sichuan, Shaanxi, Henan, Shanxi, Hebei, Shandong, Beijing, and every shade of PLA, police, and PAP registration. Even for people like us, who cut across Gannan and were aiming not at Lanzhou but at Haidong, the narrow winding provincial lanes of the countryside have trapped us just as firmly as an intestinal loop.

2011-01-29 23:35 We are like the great Spring Festival travel crowds of years ago, wedged fast on the barren spine where the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau has only just begun to rise. Drivers around us say the line of vehicles now stretches far enough to jam every provincial and national road from Lanzhou to Xining. When we first unknowingly joined this queue the night before last, we were delighted to have finally caught up again with the main stream of retreat. By the time we realized it was a dead end, cars had already piled in behind us and locked us into the line, unable either to advance or retreat.

2011-01-29 23:35 Exposed among so many people, the supplies that had once seemed abundant suddenly feel painfully thin. There are no country folk walking the jam selling hot eggs and tea kettles the way they used to in the old days. Instead there are only all kinds of people trying, by force or by guile, openly or quietly, to squeeze water and food out of your hands. Helicopters circle overhead, and soldiers and police patrol on motorcycles. There is no epidemic prevention here, no inspections. Traffic radio keeps playing highway love songs, and the sound of them feels impossibly remote.

01-30 09:00 Last night a gang of Hui men came trying to rob us, but we scared them off by pulling our guns. In the middle of the night someone smashed the Warrior’s windshield into a web of cracks with a brick. This morning, when I got out to piss, I found that all our tires had been punctured. The line of vehicles is still packed tight enough that not a drop could move. The radio says the Longhai Railway is still operating and is urging everyone to abandon their private cars and evacuate by public transport.

2011-01-31 16:12 Because they stepped up traffic diversion ahead of us, after another twenty-six hours of waiting we finally managed to get free of the provincial road and work our way by village lanes into Xunhua. Supposedly the reason for the new traffic control was that military logistics convoys assigned to Lanzhou Military Region had been stuck behind us and couldn’t get through. Xunhua is a Salar autonomous county; most people can’t tell Salars apart from Hui. Order here is much better. The air is full of the smell of radish, mutton, and hand-pulled noodle soup.

2011-01-31 16:12 Xunhua county town gets abundant sunlight. Flat-roofed houses climb the hillside in staggered rows, many with floor-to-ceiling glass fronts. Local men in white embroidered caps stand in front of their own doorways with legs planted wide. This is home to Asia’s largest underground military factory, and something bulges at their waists, the famous Xunhua-made guns. Women in green headscarves sit together in twos and threes, watching the dust-caked refugees flooding their little town as if we had nothing at all to do with them.

2011-01-31 23:58 By night, the little town is pricked all over with car headlights and flashlight beams, filling lanes that should have been dark. Behind the glass windows of the houses, stove fires sway and flicker like light from another world. Military police stand guard at the county government offices and the primary school, where field tents and military trucks in olive green are set up inside. At dusk we managed to get fuel, to our immense delight. Fresh water is running low, and we can’t bear to waste bottled water on washing. We need to find somewhere to do laundry.