2011-02-01 00:45 Overnight the government set up porridge kitchens all along the main streets of the county town, serving pilaf and clear noodle soup. Unexpectedly, I even saw blue tents marked with the United Nations emblem. At last, medical vehicles were visible again, and my wife ran off to collect some glucose and cold medicine. It was already after midnight. The smell of roasting mutton was drifting everywhere, and for a moment I felt as though I had slipped back many years into a night market in the northwest. I have a feeling we’re going to be staying here for a while.
2011-02-01 00:53 There are more guns on the streets now, and oddly enough they act as a kind of balance. The little town has grown quite peaceful. Everyone has relaxed for the moment, as if this place were the end of the road. Blade found the black market and traded canned fish for a few boxes of ammunition. We’ve parked on the outskirts, far from the town center, where there used to be potato plots. Many travelers without shelter are camped along the roadside, mostly people who got here by hitching rides after their electric scooters ran out of power. They’re too exhausted to move and short on supplies.
2011-02-01 21:37 Today is the first day of February. In another two weeks it will be Spring Festival, and I have no idea what state we’ll be in by then. This morning we went to the tents bearing the UN insignia. They’re UNDP people, and today they were recruiting UNVs. Our motives, of course, were anything but pure. We only wanted one more layer of protection. Plenty of others had the same idea. When we signed up, military police were handing out application forms. My instincts screamed at me not to fill them in honestly.
2011-02-01 21:44 In the end, only my wife and Old Ma got UNV assignments. My wife is helping distribute drinking water, and Old Ma, along with many other volunteers, has been assigned to group and register the outsiders in Xunhua county who show cold symptoms. UNV work comes with meals: self-heating military rice packs. I was actually selected too, but they wanted me to guard refrigerated trucks filled with samples taken from the disease dead, and I refused.
2011-02-02 13:03 Before dawn this morning, a dense burst of gunfire tore through the little town, like a string of ten thousand firecrackers going off at once. By late morning we learned that several military police on the night shift had had their throats slit and their weapons stolen. Supposedly the robbers all wore V-shaped badges pinned to their upper arms. That’s a remarkably stupid way to make yourself conspicuous. Around noon military police inspected our cars, but because we had UNDP-issued badges, they didn’t siphon our tanks dry. Old Ma says there are a lot of people running low fevers.
2011-02-02 23:56 Tonight they handed out a yellow medicinal liquid and ordered us to drink it in three doses. Since we’d already been injected with isotopes, none of us drank it, except Blade, who swallowed his without a second thought. Last night it wasn’t only the throat-slittings. Several cars were stolen too. We don’t dare sleep in the tents anymore, so we’ve parked our three vehicles pressed tightly side by side in a line, with only the cab on the far left usable for getting in and out. On the iPod we watched Zhao Benshan’s old comedy sketches. The final year of them was unexpectedly sad to watch.
2011-02-03 12:55 This morning at the porridge station it was clear noodle soup again, though this time there was actually cabbage in it, and I couldn’t decide whether it was safe to eat. A few more medical tents marked with the blue Star of Life have appeared on the main street, and a lot of people are on IV drips. Fortunately there don’t seem to have been any deaths yet. The local Salar people are very wary of us outsiders, though they’re perfectly cordial to other Qinghai natives. Some people who can speak Qinghai dialect have even managed to move into private homes. I’m going to try my luck too.
2011-02-03 18:04 Something happened to Blade’s wife today. During the lunch break she suddenly developed a fever, accompanied by mild convulsions, darting eye movements, and a racing pulse. Blade tried to take her to a medical tent, but the symptoms vanished halfway there. In the afternoon she had two more episodes, both lasting only a little over ten minutes, and afterward she felt completely normal. Blade didn’t dare ask a doctor directly. He could only inquire in private whether anyone else had shown similar symptoms and what the consequences might be.
2011-02-03 23:57 Tonight I traded a forty-five-liter Pathfinder backpack to a stranger who also drives a Sahara in exchange for two single-beam laser emitters, shaped like flashlights and capable of firing green laser beams. Supposedly they’re especially useful at night, enough to blind someone in an instant. Blade’s wife had two more episodes this afternoon, though still no other symptoms. At dusk the military police forced two robbers at the county courthouse, and half the town went to watch.
2011-02-03 23:58 Xunhua is only one hundred and sixty kilometers from Xining. Even with detours it shouldn’t be more than two hundred. We agreed to leave tomorrow. We can’t stay here forever. We need to keep moving west. Around nine o’clock tonight, army engineering vehicles started rolling down Provincial Road 202. The lead vehicle carried a huge placard reading “Convoy Begins.” The line kept roaring past until just now, when the tail vehicle finally appeared, also carrying a big sign, this one with “Convoy Ends” spelled out in glowing batons.
2011-02-04 08:39 Before dawn we were jolted awake by an enormous roar. Outside it was bright as day. Several blinding white arcs rose from a valley more than ten kilometers away and streaked east across the sky. PL said they were Dongfeng-25B medium-range surface-to-surface missiles. I know Second Artillery units of Lanzhou Military Region are deployed in Haidong. No one knows what happened or where those missiles were headed. A moment later several more white trails rose, this time flying southeast.
2011-02-04 08:52 Note: the Dongfeng-25B medium-range conventional surface-to-surface missile, an upgraded version of the Dongfeng-25, also known as the Dongfeng-21C, with an effective range of 3,200 kilometers, enough to cover most targets in Asia. It can carry three warheads but has no guidance module. It uses a five-axle semi-trailer launcher for mobility.
2011-02-05 00:27 I spent the whole day in dread, with images of Judgment Day filling my head. I had never before seen a missile launch so magnificent and so terrifying. The radio says the purpose was to completely destroy the contaminated forests of Shennongjia and Zhangjiajie. But against forests, what good are missiles compared to incendiaries? Even though no formal martial order has been announced, no one in Xunhua dares leave now. Another two engineering convoys passed through this afternoon and evening.
2011-02-05 00:37 Ever since the business in Sangke, there’s been a layer between us and Old Ma. Even ordinary conversation has become stiff. I don’t want to force myself to act more magnanimous than I feel, but I do hope we can close this gap somehow, because all of us understand more clearly now how important it is to survive together, and we need to know one another better than before. So a strange but somehow sensible thing has started happening: every day everyone competes to take on work, trying to dissolve something unspoken. Blade alone remains stubbornly himself.
2011-02-05 10:34 This morning more than a dozen military trucks rolled into the county town. A man in his fifties wearing a major general’s insignia broadcast over the loudspeakers, recruiting construction workers for fortification work in Guide. He wouldn’t say exactly what they were building, only that food and lodging were covered, immunity guaranteed, and military goods issued. I suspect those engineering convoys from the past two days were all headed there. Now they must be short of engineers, so they’re recruiting civilians. What could they possibly be doing in Guide? That’s downstream from Longyang Gorge.
2011-02-05 10:35 None of us intends to go, but many people signed up, especially those with no car and no remaining baggage. The major general said a convoy would come at noon to collect them. The military police under his command were wearing black steel helmets, and on those helmets I saw that familiar emblem again: a soldier in a helmet holding a stalk of wheat. They spread out and began explaining the policies for the construction site. We all hid ourselves away with the UNDP people.
2011-02-06 00:21 It’s midnight, and the county town is still thick with shifting headlights, elongated shadows sliding across the endless black backdrop. All day long military trucks have carried people away, only to unload even more, apparently redirected here in an organized way from other jammed provincial roads. The officers recruiting laborers are still moving among the travelers, stressing more and more the guarantee of food. Longyang Gorge. I’d heard stories about it as early as primary school.
2011-02-06 00:36 Blade’s wife has now been having these episodes for two full days. Blade says she is generally normal in the car, but more likely to have an attack while standing on sandy ground. It suddenly occurred to us that she is the only one who neither received the isotope injection nor drank the yellow medicine. At dusk we had her drink the dose she’d skipped that day, and sure enough she was much better by evening. Too many new arrivals have crowded into the county town now; even the open ground beside our cars is full, and things have become oppressively cramped. Even going out to relieve yourself means a long walk.
2011-02-06 14:23 Today more travelers, though by now they probably ought to be called drifters, kept pouring in. From Qingshui to Jiezi the place was packed with people, and the banks of the Yellow River were covered in tents of every bright color. Soot-streaked, dust-caked people could do little besides chop wood and drink boiled river water; most survived only on relief from the porridge kitchens. We decided to leave here and head west along the Yellow River. If all went well, once past Lijia Gorge we could take the Xita Expressway straight to Xining.
2011-02-06 15:51 UNDP’s bottled drinking water had long since run out. My wife was helping distribute a simple water-filtering device that let people drink straight from the Yellow River. It was just a plastic tube containing seven layers of filter mesh; short of heavy-metal contamination, it could purify any water source. Unfortunately the supply was tiny, at most only a few thousand units. My wife was told that once they were all handed out, her appointment would end as well, and someone kindly advised her to move farther upstream.
2011-02-06 16:05 I went to the temporary military service depot to buy matches and unexpectedly ran into my middle-school classmate Gajian. He’s from Ledu, and his whole family fled to his grandmother’s place in Xunhua on January 20. I asked why he hadn’t headed toward Xining, and he said, “Who still goes to the cities now? Our house is already full of relatives who ran from Xining and Lanzhou.” I was stunned. Wasn’t Lanzhou supposed to be the “rear area” on the radio? If even the locals had fled, what kind of scene must the city be in now?
2011-02-06 19:22 After my wife finished up a little after five, we drove out of the county town. Old Ma hadn’t gone back to work for UNDP yesterday; he said the job was too dangerous. When we reached Yimamu Bridge, we found that only military vehicles were allowed through. So we kept following the Yellow River bank. The road was swarming with people, so chaotic that we couldn’t build up any speed at all. We crept all the way to Zanzhongzhuang only to find that we couldn’t cross the river there either. They couldn’t seriously expect us to take sheepskin rafts, could they?
2011-02-06 19:38 While we were hesitating by the bridge about whether to keep going or what to do, we ran into Gajian again. He was driving a Great Wall pickup back to his home on Gandu Street. After seeing our situation, he whispered a few words to the sentry on the bridge, then waved grandly for us to follow him, and we crossed without trouble. Only then did I realize that the guards on this bridge were Hui and Salar militiamen, wearing green badges painted with a star and crescent.
2011-02-06 19:48 Gajian said it was already so late that we might as well stay at his place. His grandmother’s home on Gandu Street was a large riverside compound, with a front courtyard big enough to serve as a parking lot for more than twenty cars. Back in school Gajian had always been low-key and honest; I never imagined his family was this well-off. Plenty of vehicles were already parked in the courtyard. Besides local plates, there were several off-roaders from Sichuan and Shaanxi too, apparently other outsiders like us.
2011-02-07 00:03 We were settled into three single-story rooms in the west yard. It had been so long since we’d slept in a warm house. Freshly washed socks were drying on the heater pipes, and outside, parachute cord was strung from car to car with clothes that had been washed all evening hanging from it. We spoke with Gajian and confirmed it would be no problem for us to stay two days. Even though his family certainly wouldn’t mention money, we had to show something. We scraped together a roll of dollars from Blade and pressed it on him. He didn’t refuse.
2011-02-07 00:41 Gajian’s grandmother’s household runs a farmhouse inn, which explains why there are so many rooms. I had just gone to the toilet and tripped over something; when I got up I realized it was a person lying on the ground. I helped her up and found it was a woman staying in the next room. When I helped open her door, I saw she was by herself, having made it here alone all the way from Chengdu. Remarkable, really. From the way she described it, her symptoms were the same as Blade’s wife’s.
2011-02-07 00:48 There are actually militiamen standing watch around Gajian’s courtyard, three to a group, and they’re well equipped. He explained that after the situation turned chaotic, nearby people of the same community had formed a collective. I know the ethnic makeup here is complicated, with Salar, Hui, Tibetan, and even Bonan and Dongxiang communities, each with its own groups. It’s hard to believe such disciplined paramilitary forces were assembled in so short a time. They must have existed all along.
2011-02-07 11:39 This morning I finally had a satisfying bath in the yard’s washroom, using water pumped straight from the Yellow River. After eating two kunguo flatbreads, I carried a little folding stool into the courtyard and chatted away with the other travelers. There were people from Chengdu, Mianyang, Guangyuan, Xi’an, Baoji, and Tianshui. It felt very much like years ago in a little guesthouse in Motuo, talking with strangers. Conditions were much the same everywhere; only Mianyang still had garrison troops. In Shaanxi, many people had evacuated toward Inner Mongolia.
2011-02-07 11:48 The woman I met last night was there too. She wore an olive quick-dry shirt, and the exposed stretch of one arm was covered in scars. Her Twitter handle, @leftry, was embroidered on her cuff. Her companions had all been lost on the road, and only she had made it this far. Mentioning Twitter reminded me to prop up the VSAT from the car and get online. Twitter wouldn’t open. I tried sending a message through a client I’d built myself, but it failed. Those base stations must all be down.
2011-02-07 16:09 Though Gandu lies only a river away from Xunhua county town, its streets are much quieter, with none of the dust-colored drifters in sight. The white courtyard walls glare under the plateau sun. Sitting in the yard, I can see a tall tower capped with a crescent spire, and even a lama temple in a hybrid Han-Tibetan style. At noon I slipped out alone to spin the prayer wheels and light two butter lamps. Afraid of offending Gajian’s family, I didn’t go straight back, and instead strolled along the river for a while.
2011-02-07 16:30 More than a dozen large SUVs were jammed at the bridgehead we crossed yesterday, all luxury models like Lexuses. The people inside were waving submachine guns, trying to force their way across, but the bridge guards refused to yield. Dozens of guns came up in unison, and there were even rocket launchers. After a tense standoff, a Q7 with Lanzhou plates drove up and led the convoy back toward Yimamu Bridge to cross there instead. Then I suddenly spotted a familiar vehicle at the tail end: that Hummer H5.
2011-02-08 00:06 Toward evening I went to the lama temple again, hoping to ask the geshe for some Tibetan medicine. Instead I found that the convoy of luxury SUVs that had crossed the river this afternoon had settled there. Three of the vehicles carried military plates. There had to be twenty or thirty people in thirteen cars, yet only a dozen or so were drawing water and cooking; the rest never got out. They all wore hoods and monk-like robes, and several even had gas masks on. The bald man was among them too.
2011-02-08 00:12 Afraid the bald man would spot me, I backed out. But I had already realized that this convoy must have been assembled piece by piece along the road, because the plates were from different places and the conditions of the cars and the wear on the tires didn’t match. But the military vehicle that had led them across the bridge had to belong to real military people, and important ones at that. Otherwise how could it possibly have passed Yimamu Bridge? The whole thing was baffling: they were so secretive, and staying here of all places.
2011-02-08 00:15 That evening Gajian invited me to his family’s dinner. I grew up in the Muslim quarter of Dongguan in Xining, and I even had a distant grandmother from a Hui family, so I still know some of the etiquette. Gajian’s elder brother Naibao asked me in great detail about what we’d seen along the way. When he finished listening, he said that Xining and Chengdu were not the same, and that they were preparing a convoy to return there, because in the coming months Xining would become even safer.
2011-02-08 00:26 I asked in astonishment why, but he would say no more, only that the Dongguan Great Mosque was a place under Allah’s protection. After dinner, though, Gajian quietly told me that this had to do with military engineering works in the upper Yellow River. Supposedly they were carrying out a quarantine measure called “Green Dam” to secure the water sources upstream. Once that happened, the banks downstream from Lijia Gorge would become unsafe, and Lanzhou itself might even be abandoned.
2011-02-08 00:26 Xining, by contrast, depends on the Huangshui River, which has strong natural self-filtration, and it was not directly struck by the meteor shower. The earlier wave of retreat had been caused entirely by mass panic. West of Xining there is only boundless Gobi and the dried-up Qinghai Lake; apart from Golmud, hundreds of kilometers away, there is no major region left where humans can survive. To go farther west would be suicide. So they had decided to set out within two days and return to Xining.
2011-02-08 00:32 After I went back and discussed it with the others, we quickly decided to go with Gajian’s group, since it matched our plan anyway. To my surprise, he refused flatly. His reason was that, for certain religious reasons, his family would not travel together with outsiders. But he added that we could follow far behind them. That made little practical difference, so I agreed and thanked him. We would stay here two more days. What exactly was this “Green Dam” quarantine plan?
2011-02-08 13:59 At noon we sat in the courtyard and ate a proper bowl of lamb mianpian. I noticed @leftry sitting off by herself and quietly asked whether she would like to come with us. I’d asked Gajian about her; the reason she could stay here was that she had long traded dark tea between Qinghai and Hunan and knew many of the local merchants well. She looked at me in surprise, and after making sure I wasn’t joking, happily agreed. I arranged for PL to share a car with her.
2011-02-08 14:09 Of course, I had my own calculations. It was inconvenient for PL to stay crammed together with Old Ma’s family, so it would be better to split him off. And if @leftry knew the merchants here, chances were she knew people in other parts of Haidong as well. With the future so uncertain, one more person meant one more chance. Besides, the fact that she was the only one of her companions to survive surely wasn’t mere coincidence. She drove a battered old Jetta and didn’t mind taking one more passenger. PL wore a blank expression and made no comment.
2011-02-08 22:21 The lama temple outside has caught fire. Everyone is helping put it out. For all that these different groups normally keep apart, almost like fire and water, when trouble comes they don’t hesitate. There’s no relying on a fire brigade here; the town has its own civilian mutual-aid fire teams. We’re helping drag hoses.
2011-02-08 23:25 Fortunately the fire only burned one of the temple’s side buildings. It was probably just someone cooking a late-night meal and letting it get out of hand. The SUV convoy that had been in the courtyard was already gone; I have no idea when they left. The lamas and Tibetan locals were clearing the fire scene, and the militia withdrew of their own accord to avoid giving offense. Near the flowerbeds in the courtyard I saw a great deal of gauze thrown aside, as though it had just been unwound from patients’ bodies, stiff with dried blood.
2011-02-08 23:33 The lamas carried strange charred bones out of the burned building, just barely identifiable as having four limbs, and giving off a nauseating scorched smell. I didn’t know what they were. Probably human, I guessed, yet in many ways inconsistent with human skeletons. More and more Tibetans living nearby were arriving, so I withdrew uneasily. We are leaving here first thing tomorrow morning. Gajian’s group will set out before noon, and we have been told to leave ahead of them.
2011-02-09 11:23 On the road again. Setting out once more. This route is somewhat more familiar, but because of the season and the altitude, supplies will be even harder to find. There are still ten days left until Spring Festival. The other travelers staying in Gajian’s courtyard were also turned out. Lacking preparation, some went looking for other shelter, while others fell in behind our convoy. We plan to drive a few miles ahead and wait in place for Gajian’s convoy to pass.
2011-02-09 13:11 After waiting more than two hours, we finally saw dust rising on the road and a convoy hurtling toward us. There were more than twenty vehicles, all kinds of them, including even a black riot-control truck. At the front and rear were armored cash vans. Once the convoy had passed, we hung far behind it. I found their frequency on the radio; it wasn’t encrypted, but they were speaking in Xunhua dialect mixed with Arabic, making them very hard to understand.
2011-02-09 15:24 We had not driven long along Provincial Road 202 before, near Hequn Reservoir outside Hualong, we saw the Salar convoy come to a stop in the distance. Through binoculars we could see that local Hui militiamen had set up a roadblock. Hualong is a Hui autonomous county. Though they follow the same religion, the two sides did not seem to be getting along very well. After arguing for a while, the convoy drove down off the roadbed and turned left onto Provincial Road 203 to the west. They were evidently going to bypass Hualong.
2011-02-09 15:28 Once the convoy ahead had gone, the Hui militia from Hualong quickly spotted us, and several pickups belching black smoke came charging our way. I knew that in a place and time like this there was no point trying to reason with anyone, so I shouted for everyone to turn around and floored the accelerator. They gave symbolic chase for a few kilometers, fired several shots into the air, and then turned back. We found a small road leading west and felt our way toward Provincial Road 203.
2011-02-09 16:23 The eight counties of Haidong are the most prosperous part of Qinghai. Even the country houses are fairly decent; at the very least you don’t see any of those old earthen-brick dwellings. Because of the historical influence of Han settlers who moved inland here, many courtyards have the habit of keeping flowerbeds. But because of the climate the fields are utterly barren, and the rolling mountains show nothing but dry yellow-brown soil. Only the patches of white mottling on the poplars remind us that the plants here are all dead.
2011-02-09 22:49 A little after five in the afternoon we caught sight of the Xunhua convoy again. They had planned to take Provincial Road 203 to the Ping’a Expressway, but near Zhaba they ran into another group of local armed men. With no alternative, they turned back again and continued west, moving along the Yellow River toward Provincial Road 101. Once they reached Huangzhong they could take the Xita Expressway into Xining. But that area is traditional Tibetan turf, and if the Xunhua convoy was already this tense with the Hui of Hualong, then what awaited them in Huangzhong was even harder to predict.
2011-02-09 23:15 That night we stayed in a village halfway up the mountain north of Lijia Gorge. The Xunhua convoy was in another village only a few hundred meters away. Though this place is close to both Xunhua and Hualong, the mountain villages here were strangely abandoned, without a single villager. The magnificent Lijia Gorge Dam blazed with lights, guarded all around by People’s Armed Police. From afar we could see warning lines glowing orange. We didn’t even dare light a campfire, for fear of drawing trouble.
2011-02-09 23:40 We picked a random farmhouse, and everything inside was still there: bedding, household things, as if the people had left in a hurry. We had just fallen asleep when Old Ma’s wife came knocking to say that @leftry was having another episode. Luckily we still had some of the yellow medicine left over from before, so we gave her a bottle to drink. Blade’s wife has been all right these past few days, though she has grown somewhat dull. A Salar scout stopped by to look us over that night and tacitly accepted our shadowing them.
2011-02-10 09:13 Daybreak. From here we could overlook the grand sweep of Lijia Gorge Reservoir. The Yellow River here ought still to have been a clear, gleaming expanse of blue-green water. At the moment it wasn’t muddy, yet it somehow looked lifeless. Through binoculars I could see armed-police engineering troops busy on the dam. Tanker trucks stood in a long line, pouring yellow liquid from the dam into the reservoir. I have no idea what they were doing. Could they really be trying to disinfect the entire reservoir? It seemed hopelessly inadequate.
2011-02-10 13:48 North of Lijia Gorge the mountain country is all Tibetan townships. Fortunately no one was left here; otherwise the Salar convoy, which their scout insisted last night we refer to by the full name “Salar,” would probably have run into serious trouble. This stretch of road was hard going, and it was noon before we reached Ashigong and got onto Provincial Road 101. Farther west lay Longyang Gorge. The Salar convoy stopped here to cook, while we refilled our water by the river. We were running low on fuel.
2011-02-10 21:18 Like the Chengdu-Mianyang Expressway, the Xita Expressway was completely blocked by abandoned vehicles and shell craters. It was impossible to pass. So we followed the Salar convoy along the old road northward. Here and there you could still see occupied houses with lights on, and the air smelled of butter tea. Old Ma’s car ran out of fuel, so we picked a house and made camp there, then took jerrycans and drove Blade’s car up to the Xita Expressway to siphon gasoline from the tanks of abandoned vehicles.
2011-02-11 07:17 In the middle of the night we were awakened by dense gunfire and explosions. We stood in the courtyard peering out. It seemed the Salar convoy was exchanging fire with someone. Both sides had heavy weapons. We didn’t light a single lamp, afraid of exposing ourselves, like children watching fireworks in the dark. The fighting lasted nearly two hours before ending. It looked as though Gajian’s people had lost. Night swallowed everything. None of us slept again. We kept watch in every direction.
2011-02-11 09:06 At first light, Blade and I took our guns, found a pedal tricycle at the farmhouse, and cautiously rode over to the site of the battle. The riot-control truck had had its roof blown off and was smoking with a scorched, foul farmyard stench. The Salar convoy had been wiped out to the last person; even the women and children had been spared no mercy. Whoever attacked them in the night struck hard and had plenty of firepower. It was pure revenge, because they hadn’t even bothered to clear the battlefield. The two of us picked through the dead for useful things.
2011-02-11 13:14 In the morning we planned to observe the situation around us before moving on, especially since Xining was already close. But very quickly a small squad of Tibetan soldiers found us and surrounded us with two Land Cruisers and some motorcycles. While we were still at a loss, @leftry explained in halting Tibetan that we were refugees from Sichuan. I hurriedly showed them the Buddhist beads hanging from my medal ribbon and the khata in the car, and as it happened I really did have a khata blessed by a living Buddha from Kumbum Monastery.
2011-02-11 13:21 The Tibetan soldiers said a few words about being careful and were just about to leave when they spotted the guns we had picked up that morning lying on the ground. Instantly they all raised their weapons again. Blade’s Tibetan has a Jinchuan accent, and he hurried to explain that we had only picked up a few firearms for self-defense, though I don’t know whether they understood him. In a few swift moves the soldiers confiscated our pistols too. After speaking over the radio for quite a while, several of them jumped into our vehicles and said they were taking us to Kumbum Monastery.
2011-02-11 14:46 The cars had not driven long before they stopped, short of the monastery itself. In the distance I could see a great golden roof flashing brilliantly in the sun. This was a small town on the outskirts of Lushaer county, and at last we understood why all the Tibetan villages along the way had been empty: everyone had gathered around the monasteries, settling in an orderly way into farmhouses or tent camps in groups. Old Ma’s wife, PL, and the others, who couldn’t stand the smell of butter tea, all covered their noses.
2011-02-11 14:51 We were left sitting in the cars with the keys removed and no one paying us any attention. Two Tibetan soldiers kept watch over us with their guns while chatting with nearby villagers. The local children gathered around to stare at us curiously, but without hostility. One Tibetan woman even brought us a pot of butter tea, which moved me almost to tears. But why were they detaining us? In the distance came the low, mournful blare of dungchen horns. People prostrating themselves in long bows were everywhere.
2011-02-11 22:01 It was fully dark. We were eating boiled cured pork with butter tea when at last a group of Tibetan soldiers arrived escorting a high lama. We put on our most pitiful expressions and explained ourselves at length. After checking our ID cards, the lama agreed to let us go, but advised us not to enter Xining. The Tibetans near Kumbum Monastery were evacuating in an organized way toward Yushu, and the resourceful monks of Kumbum had even managed to secure a train that would depart west along the Qinghai-Tibet line for Tibet.
2011-02-11 22:21 Since the neighbors here were friendly, we decided to stay the night. Even if we could still reach Xining, charging into a silent city in pitch darkness would not be wise. Leftry suggested that instead of doing that, why not simply head into Tibet? If we missed this train, we would never get another chance. She was right. Blade went after the high lama to ask when and where the train would depart. Before that, though, if time allowed, we still wanted to take a look at Xining.
2011-02-11 22:58 Blade found out that the train would leave from Duoba on the afternoon of the 13th, but the number of passengers it could take was extremely limited, and there was no guarantee the railway ahead was even intact. Many of the men had chosen on their own to drive or even go on foot, giving the places to women and children. Others had no intention of leaving at all, especially the devout believers prostrating themselves beneath the bodhi tree. Tibetan Buddhism is about the next life. Blade really is impressive: he even managed to get back the pistol that had been confiscated.
2011-02-12 10:46 When we woke in the morning, more than half the Tibetan tents around us were already empty. From afar came waves of chanting, and the crowds had all converged on the square at Kumbum Monastery. We packed up and left without a word. Since the Xita Expressway was impassable, we needed to go from Lushaer to Duoba and circle into Xining from the west side. Many place names in Qinghai are Mongolian in origin; after Liberation many were given Han names, while Tibetans have their own separate set of names for them.
2011-02-12 12:26 Duoba Station has only a tiny platform. It’s a freight station; even the slow local passenger trains don’t stop here. At that moment an old green train was standing there, about twenty carriages long, though I couldn’t see a locomotive. Repair workers were crawling in and out underneath it like ants. The high lama had said yesterday that anyone with prayer beads could board, so long as you could physically get yourself onto it. After checking the route, we continued on toward Xining.
2011-02-12 14:58 As we approached Xining, my heart started beating faster for no clear reason. Its western outskirts are a satellite town called Xigang, inhabited by workers originally sent west from the Northeast, speaking Northeastern dialect and living lives oddly out of place in this northwestern city. It has Xining’s only piped gas network, and used to be called the least painful place to commit suicide, because the gas there was odorless. But now the streets were full of corpses already beginning to rot.
2011-02-12 22:36 Xining is even more desolate than Chengdu was; probably we simply left Chengdu much earlier in the collapse. Burned-out buildings, abandoned cars, looted shopping centers, skeletons no longer identifiable. I have no idea what the Salar were basing their judgment of Xining on. Plainly this is a gigantic concrete tomb. I have deep feelings for this city, yet even so I was beginning to regret coming here.
2011-02-12 22:45 The Huangshui River had once run completely dry when I was a child. Later, after remediation, though the water remained badly polluted, the current grew much stronger. It is the only environmental improvement I have ever seen with my own eyes. Since Gajian said the Huangshui was central to Xining’s natural water filtration, we decided to find somewhere along the river to stay. Before dark we found a residential compound on Haiyan Road. The area was fairly clean, with no collapsed corpses nearby.
2011-02-13 10:03 When I woke in the morning and breathed the cold plateau air, I could still see blue sky overhead, even though it was full of urban particulates. It was almost mocking, that in such a ruined environment the weather could be finer than in normal times. We packed up and planned to drive around nearby a bit before heading to Duoba Station. Coming into the city from the west, we hadn’t seen many cars or much abandoned luggage. I believe most people must have fled out of the city toward the southeast.
2011-02-13 16:09 The high lama deceived us. We reached Duoba Station before noon, only to find the platform empty and the train long gone from the tracks. A few elderly Tibetans with graying braids were moving along the railway in full-body prostrations. We went over to ask them, and they said the train had left this morning. It simply could not hold any more people; even the roof had been packed with people and sheep. They had yielded the chance to their sons and grandchildren and would go on foot as far as they could.
2011-02-13 16:21 We returned to Xining crestfallen. Even if the gasoline never ran out, driving deeper into the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau at this point would amount to seeking death. Passing through Xigang again, Blade suddenly cried out over the radio: “Don’t you think something’s wrong?” I slowed down and looked carefully. The rows of matchbox-like old apartment blocks, the snapped gas pipes, looked no different from yesterday, except that the corpses on the ground seemed, somehow, fewer.
2011-02-13 16:26 We stopped at an intersection, and I put on rubber gloves to examine the bodies by the roadside while Old Ma and Blade stood guard with their guns. I turned over two or three of them. They were already decomposing and giving off waves of stench. But they did not seem likely to turn into wandering zombies after dark like in the movies. The only conclusion I could draw was that someone had been clearing corpses here last night. But who would do that? The whole city had been abandoned. What possible gain could there be in it?
2011-02-13 22:24 We waited in Xigang until dark but saw no sign of living people. Our whole group trudged back dispirited to the place where we had spent the previous night. Tomorrow we need to think seriously about the days ahead. We still haven’t been to central Xining. At dusk we had planned to drive around there, but when we reached the Xinning intersection and saw great swaths of bodies lying on the ground, we simply didn’t have the nerve to go farther. My wife and I both put on masks. I fear there may be an epidemic here.
2011-02-14 11:16 This morning everyone gloomily discussed what to do next. No one spoke. Each of us sat with head lowered, thinking our own thoughts. I almost wished someone would start a shouting match. After a long while, LR, Leftry, said she wanted to go take another look around the city center, and left by herself. Old Ma said he and his wife wanted to return to Xunhua, where they might be able to find work, or at least other people. PL sat there in his usual dull stupor. Blade looked at me without comment. As for me, I wanted to stay here a while longer and see.
2011-02-14 15:30 The residential compound where we had camped was made up of buildings from the early 1990s. It was probably awaiting demolition; several blocks facing the street had already been emptied out. At noon we drew water from the Huangshui River with the simple filter and, after boiling it, found no suspended matter. There were animal tracks in the sandy ground by the river. Then I remembered that less than a kilometer along the bank stood Xining’s only zoo. In the afternoon we went to Xinning Square, where there were several large supermarkets. There ought to be some supplies left.
2011-02-14 18:14 A major fire had swept the area around Xinning Square, taking dozens of nearby buildings with it. We got nothing from the ruins, but on the way back we took a case of Tianyoude liquor from a tobacco and alcohol shop, which could serve as alcohol if needed. If you looked closely, you could see that the distribution of bodies outdoors followed a pattern: they appeared only on roads leading to the city’s ring routes, while the inner side streets were all empty. Had the bodies been cleared away, or deliberately left there?
2011-02-14 22:31 In the evening Blade and I drank in silence. There was nothing to go with the liquor, so after every sip we carved one character into the concrete with a small blade. By now we had almost finished inscribing “Bring in the Wine.” Blade joked that tomorrow we should go hunting at the zoo. I said sure, the lake’s still frozen, maybe there are fish. In truth, finding other supermarkets was more urgent. LR had been out all day and still hadn’t come back.
2011-02-15 09:00 I woke very early this morning and got up to write my diary. Only when I saw the date, the fifteenth, did I remember yesterday had been Valentine’s Day. 2011-02-15 22:49 All festivals are luxuries humanity indulges in only when life already has its brocade. On this same day last year, my wife and I were eating fajitas and drinking red wine in a Mexican restaurant. A year later, all we have left is rock-hard cured pork. LR didn’t come back all night. Old Ma’s son has come down with a yellow, wasting sickness and has had diarrhea for two days. If it doesn’t stop soon, we’ll have trouble.
2011-02-15 22:49 Today we found a little shop that had not been pried open. Inside were instant noodles with pickled vegetables, which to us tasted like food from heaven. Old Ma rummaged through the rooms upstairs where we were staying and found a few bottles of Vitamin C, cod-liver oil, and other capsules. Whether they would help or not, he gave them all to his son. After more observation we confirmed yet again that the bodies in the streets had not simply collapsed where they stood. They had been deliberately arranged as roadblocks. Why? To stop cowards like us?
2011-02-15 22:56 We also went to the zoo. It had already been relocated, leaving behind only empty cages and artificial caverns. In the dead gray-white woods there were animal tracks. Tomorrow we plan to cross the city and take a look at the eastern district. For two days now we’ve been saying that it’s the traditional Hui quarter. If the Salar ever reached Xining, I think they would certainly have gone there. LR still hasn’t come back. Two days now.
2011-02-16 22:59 I was in terrible spirits today, with no mind to record anything, not even any appetite. Maybe it’s end-of-days depression. Like PL, I found myself thinking that once the remaining water was gone, that would be that. Just now Old Ma said the three of them plan to head for Lanzhou tomorrow morning. Blade said in that case they might as well go to Longyang Gorge, where there should be plenty of workers from the earlier engineering projects. I don’t want to go anywhere. This city is where I grew up. I don’t want to leave. I just want to stay here and die.
2011-02-16 23:04 LR still hasn’t returned. I’m afraid either something happened to her or she has already left. The places where we marked corpses yesterday have changed again. Some bodies have shifted position, and some have even turned into different bodies altogether. Could they really be zombies? But there has been no movement at night, only the sound of running water. During the day my wife saw animal tracks by the river again. Tonight I told everyone to pitch tents inside the rooms so that no light would leak out.
2011-02-16 23:06 Without light interference, you can see that deep within the city there are lights in many places after all. Even in the building across the street from us, just one block away, faint pinpricks of candlelight seep through, invisible unless you look very carefully. All day we have been striding about boldly through empty streets, not knowing how many eyes were watching us through windows. But what are they hiding from?
2011-02-17 12:23 Last night we agreed to set out together: Old Ma’s family would go to Lanzhou, while we would swing by the eastern district. He dragged things out for more than an hour this morning, urging me several times before I finally came downstairs. PL didn’t want to go and stayed behind to guard our camp. The sky was blue, honestly far better than Chengdu’s oppressive haze, but somehow that only made it lonelier. A helicopter passed overhead, circled once above us, and flew away.
2011-02-17 17:34 Xining’s condition is far worse than Chengdu’s. On West Street we found a huge pit leading straight down into the underground civil-defense works. At first I thought it had been shelled or blown open, but when I looked closer, the lip was unlike a blast crater. In the broken rebar and concrete at the bottom were scattered chunks of gray-black stone. Blade was about to bend down and pick one up when I grabbed him and said, “Doesn’t it look familiar?” He looked again and cried out: “A meteor crater!”
2011-02-17 17:47 We withdrew from the crater as quickly and carefully as we could, afraid of getting contaminated by meteor grit. Only then, looking around, did we notice that the vast central square at Ximenkou did not have a single tree. The dead grass in the flowerbeds stood upright as if full of life, and what made it uncanny was that every blade was gray-white. Only then did we think to yank the chemical masks from our packs and put them on, though it was probably already too late.
2011-02-17 18:37 We said goodbye to Old Ma’s family at Ximenkou. Before leaving, his eyes still held that same guilt. I reminded him to guard his water and his guns, because only with those could he keep his wife and child safe. I watched him drive east along West Street. Then all at once he vanished from sight. They had fallen into an enormous pit. Beneath my feet I distinctly felt a tremor and heard a disturbance rising from underground.
2011-02-17 18:40 Xining doesn’t have a subway, but the entire underground beneath the city center is hollowed out with civil-defense works. As early as when I was in primary school, parts of it had already been redeveloped into underground shopping arcades, and by now they formed a web beneath the whole urban core. We rushed to the huge pit into which Old Ma had fallen. It was black below, and all we could see in front of us was the metallic sheen of the car roof. Another commotion came up from underground, like the sound of birds or beasts scattering.
2011-02-17 22:20 Three hours ago, Old Ma’s family drove their Kuga into the giant pit in the middle of the road. This was directly above the underground pedestrian street on West Street, more than ten meters high. I lowered myself into it on parachute cord. Old Ma’s whole family was trapped inside the car, and we had to get them out. Blade and I spent an hour pulling them free. But their bodies were in no condition to be hoisted back up the pit, so we had to look for another exit.
2011-02-17 23:15 I don’t know how we finally got back up to the surface. I only dared keep my head down and follow the circle of light cast by my flashlight on the ground. On the surface we found the nearest exit, less than a hundred meters away by the roadside. But when I returned to the pit, I realized that to reach that exit we would have to pass through a stretch of cluttered, pitch-black underground street. From within it came wave after wave of rustling sounds. Something was hiding in the shadows.
2011-02-17 23:16 The underground passage was full of people. I cannot describe what they looked like, or even say whether they were alive or dead. I could only see them sitting shoulder to shoulder, packed so densely there was no counting how many. Their clothes seemed to have rotted into rags and tangled together. From the ceiling hung ribbon-like vines, and every few meters one wound around a person’s neck. From their throats came a low electrical whine. Was this Avici Hell?
2011-02-17 23:21 We did not seem to disturb them. Even when we pried apart shoulders to force a path through, not one of them opened their eyes. Blade went first, clearing the way. They were entwined tightly, but with only a little force an arm would break off like dry firewood, exposing flesh beneath that looked weathered away. None of us dared breathe loudly. It took half an hour to cover one hundred meters. Old Ma held his son tight against his chest and covered the boy’s eyes.
2011-02-17 23:22 When we climbed out of the underground shopping street, everyone’s clothes were soaked through with cold sweat. From deep below came that indescribable moaning again. We jumped into the cars and fled toward camp as if escaping for our lives. Then Blade suddenly said that the people down there all had at least six fingers. To me they were like the underground rhizomes of a gigantic plant, perhaps already filling every space in the civil-defense tunnels. I have no idea where it will break through the surface.
2011-02-17 23:35 We returned to the residential compound where we had camped. It was empty. PL was dead. He had jumped from the sixth floor. The blood and brains on the ground had already congealed. In truth he had never come to terms with losing his girlfriend. I sent the others upstairs and stayed behind alone in the dark to gather up PL’s body.
2011-02-18 21:32 Old Ma’s whole family is injured, and his wife cannot walk. We are all so crushed by fear we can barely breathe. Two months now. Could Chengdu’s subway tunnels also be crammed like this with those beings, neither living nor dead? We buried PL by the Huangshui River together with his girlfriend’s gold hairpin and the PSP he never went anywhere without. Tomorrow, who will dig graves for us?
2011-02-19 20:55 Blade’s wife suddenly said today was Spring Festival. We checked the calendar, and sure enough she was right. The women opened all the remaining cans of braised pork, cooked a huge pot of instant noodles, and brought out the barley liquor we had hauled back a few days ago. My wife even gave Little Ma a red envelope, since money was useless now anyway. I haven’t had any appetite these past two days, but I notice I’ve stopped economizing on food and supplies entirely. We have all begun to let go. I didn’t even open my notebook today.
2011-02-20 22:10 Today is the second day of the New Year, and we have six cans left. When I was a child, the whole extended family would gather at my grandmother’s house on the second day. The adults cooked and played mahjong, the kids set off firecrackers and played video games. The first RPG my brother and I ever touched was Romance of the Three Kingdoms. I wonder if he’s still alive. Around us it is deathly quiet. Only the Huangshui River keeps flowing. We sat on the roof in the sun, talking about the past until dark. There was not a living thing in sight.
2011-02-21 12:28 After spending two days at camp in utter dejection, I felt somewhat clearer-headed when I woke this morning. We discussed moving somewhere else. If we’re going to die, we may as well die on the road. But Old Ma said today was the third day of the New Year and one must not go out. I said what relatives and friends were even left to visit now? But Old Ma’s family simply refused to move. Blade said coldly that since Old Ma’s family had effectively already broken away once, why should we keep accommodating them?
2011-02-21 13:01 Seeing Blade take such a hard line, Old Ma didn’t dare insist any further. They no longer had a car anyway. Continuing west was impossible, so we prepared to move east along the Huangshui River. For all the days we’d talked about it, we still had not gone to the eastern district. After hesitating a moment, I gave Old Ma the keys to the car LR had left behind. That made it the third car he had used on this journey. When we finished packing and headed out, I had the strange feeling I saw a figure flash past in the building opposite.
2011-02-21 17:45 The road toward the eastern district was extremely hard going. The Xita Expressway and the Lanzhou-Xining Expressway cross through the city like a great iron cross, pinning Xining’s rotten body in place. We drove through the desolate People’s Park, then came up from the shoals by the Huangshui River onto Binhe Road. This part of town was already the eastern district, and we could see all sorts of Hui buildings with green domes.
2011-02-21 17:47 We made camp in the yard of a repair shop near the old May First Club. The surroundings felt much safer than Haiyan Road. The riverbank lay only a hundred meters outside the wall. Everyone was busy settling in when my wife suddenly said she thought she could hear the prayer chant from a mosque. I straightened up and looked toward the crescent-tipped domes under the city skyline. It was almost an illusion, but I felt as if I could smell roast mutton in the air again. Blade and I slung on our packs and went out to raid shops.
2011-02-21 18:08 We didn’t take a car. At the repair shop we found a pedal tricycle and took that. The stretch by the Huangshui River was all empty commercial housing developments that had never really taken off. After pedaling uphill for a while and just reaching Qiyi Road, the atmosphere suddenly felt wrong. There were people here. In the distance we could see white steel helmets moving back and forth in the sunset, their shadows drawn long across the middle of the road, red flags snapping in the wind. That was the Xining Hotel.
2011-02-21 22:29 We found a refrigerated food storehouse at the Qinghai Military Subdistrict guesthouse, a block away. Though the power had long since failed, the cold kept the beef and mutton frozen solid. We were not the first to discover it. As soon as we got there, we ran into several middle-aged Hui men with pointed goatees pushing handcarts. When they saw that Blade and I had guns, they nodded in greeting. One of them said we were lucky: the soldiers had just withdrawn, and yesterday nothing could be taken.
2011-02-22 13:44 It was our first night in the new camp, and all of us were extremely cautious. When Blade and I dragged back the three frozen sheep yesterday, we had taken a long detour to make sure we weren’t being followed. Otherwise who knows what trouble we might have invited. We really did hear mosque prayers last night, wavering on the cold wind, impossible to locate. In the middle of the night the river rose. When we woke this morning, the exposed shoals were soaked through. Someone upstream had opened the floodgates.
2011-02-22 18:27 This morning we were awakened by the roar of helicopters. They landed right at the Xining Hotel where we had seen sentries yesterday. Over the course of the day there were six takeoffs and landings. Unfortunately the helicopters carried no visible markings, so we couldn’t tell how many separate aircraft there were, and without that there was no way to estimate the length of their route. The garrison here is very small, probably no more than a platoon, huddled inside those old buildings of the Qinghai Hotel. Military tents had been set up in the yard, and I also saw the Star of Life emblem.
2011-02-22 22:18 At dusk a military vehicle drove along Qiyi Road with the emblem of the helmeted soldier holding a stalk of wheat painted on the door. My heart lurched, and any thought I had of going to scout the Xining Hotel died at once. The Hui hidden away in the lanes of Dongguan were no easier to read. Today, when Blade and I went back to the cold storehouse, there was nothing left. Only after returning did I finally sort out what day it was: Thursday. Tomorrow the Great Mosque will hold Friday prayers.
2011-02-23 13:19 A little after ten, Blade and I left camp on foot and headed toward Dongguan. We had barely reached the mouth of North Alley when we saw militiamen carrying AK-47s. We didn’t dare go up and talk to them. Instead we slipped into the residential blocks beside the street, climbed over several walls in succession, and reached a workers’ housing compound. From there we guessed Dong Street was just outside the wall. The compound looked completely empty. We climbed to the roof of a thirty-story residential tower, and the whole eastern district spread out below us.
2011-02-23 13:22 Looking east along Dong Street, sure enough there were many people returning from prayers. Not as many as in normal times, but still astonishingly more than I had expected. They rolled up their prayer rugs and disappeared into the webwork of lanes. So the body of this city had not yet died. It could still sustain that many people. Then suddenly I remembered that beneath Dong Street there was also an underground commercial street converted from civil-defense works. Could it too be packed with those “people”?
2011-02-23 13:26 I wanted to understand what had really happened in Xining, whether this place was truly safe, and why the people of Dongguan had chosen to remain. In high school I had a close Hui classmate named Ma Baoquan, and I still remembered where his home was. After discussing it with Blade, I decided to go check by myself in the afternoon to see whether he was still there.
2011-02-24 00:53 I am now locked in a windowless one-story room. I don’t know exactly where I am, though it seems to be somewhere near Tiyu Lane. I am freezing and shaking uncontrollably. They have been stabbing my thigh with red-hot mutton skewers. I didn’t find Ma Baoquan’s house. They seized me on Huayuan South Street. I don’t know what they want from me. They examined my hands and took my temperature. My wife and the others must not come looking for me here.
2011-02-24 10:40 At daybreak they took me to another room containing several medical devices, things like ECG machines. They examined me in detail. A middle-aged Hui man with a large beard interrogated me about where I came from, whether I had companions, and where they were. I didn’t tell him the truth. I said only that I was also from Xining and had just escaped back from Golmud in search of a friend. In fact I had already given Ma Baoquan’s name yesterday, and perhaps that is why they did not kill me at once.
2011-02-24 12:12 Since the network has completely collapsed, they did not confiscate my phone. A little while ago someone brought me a bowl of cold pilaf. I haven’t had any water all night. The air smells of gunpowder, tea bricks, mutton, and disinfectant. There are many people coming and going outside, and it is very noisy. Judging from the grease stains on the floor of the room where I’m being held, this used to be a halal restaurant.
2011-02-24 17:11 I had just dozed off this afternoon when two strong men came in and took me upstairs to a private dining room. So it really was a restaurant. A moment later someone came in, and it was Ma Baoquan. I almost called out to him, but seeing the dark expression on his face, I kept my mouth shut. We hadn’t been in touch for many years. He had changed from a thin man into a fat one. He waved the two thugs out of the room, then slowly sat down and asked, “Why haven’t you been infected?”
2011-02-24 17:14 I said that on the road I had met military doctors who examined me and injected me with isotopes, and that at this stage I was already immune. Ma Baoquan’s expression softened. He said that over the past ten days they had killed more than forty outsider six-fingers. According to him, in December a huge meteor had fallen at Ximenkou, far larger than the meteor grit in Chengdu. At the time rumors spread that war had broken out, and everyone fled into the civil-defense works. None of those who went down ever came back out.
2011-02-24 18:42 Ma Baoquan went in and out several times, apparently consulting with someone. The last time he came back in, he finally said, “Come on, I’ll take you to eat.” Yet he had no intention of letting me go. I followed him downstairs. Outside was an utterly ordinary courtyard, strewn everywhere with bones and offal, rank with blood and stench. After walking a little farther, we suddenly arrived at the South Gate stadium. I barely recognized the place. Armed guards stood at the entrance.
2011-02-24 20:50 Ma Baoquan handed me a gas mask, and limping, I followed him into the stadium. The playing field had long gone to ruin. Several burned-out cars lay scattered across the dirt, and inside them there were clearly charred bones. Beneath the stands at the north end of the field, from a distance, all I could see was bodies. Baoquan gestured for me to follow him and said, “Look carefully. See if there are any you’ve met on the road.” Several militiamen in biochem helmets followed behind us with guns ready.
2011-02-24 21:10 These corpses were all recent and had not yet rotted. Their bodies were covered with gunshot and knife wounds. At a glance I spotted @leftry’s red outdoor jacket. I couldn’t see the face. The body lay face down, half buried at the calves in the dirt, the trouser legs torn away. And what showed there were not ankles at all, but rootlike vines spreading into the surrounding ground. I didn’t dare reveal that I knew her.
2011-02-24 21:35 Ma Baoquan pointed at the corpses and said that some of these people had six fingers, while others had wounds on their bodies, but after death all of them grew roots like trees, with perhaps three or four different kinds of leaves and branches. “You’ve seen the ones under West Street, haven’t you?” he said. “The roots they grow are all the same. We understand biology. We sealed the highways to stop any new species from entering Xining. God knows what this spring will bring.”
2011-02-24 21:52 I could roughly imagine the scene Ma Baoquan was describing: the infected living turning into plants, and the remains of the dead turning into plants as well. So this was how everlasting green would finally be achieved. The irony was almost unbearable. I don’t know what kind of fruit these “flora and fauna” would bear if they flowered and pollinated. But for the moment, one thing was clear: the Ma clan could kill me at any time, and if they found my wife, they would kill her too, all in the name of keeping the species pure.
2011-02-24 22:39 Ma Baoquan promised to let me go tomorrow morning, but only if I swore to stay away from the eastern district and even from Xining’s central axis. I said I would head west for Huangyuan, and repeatedly assured him that I was alone. I had been gone for two nights now. I had no idea how my wife was doing, and I was terribly afraid something might happen to her while she was on her own. The torture wound in my thigh from last night still burned to the bone, though fortunately it hadn’t damaged any tendons. They put me for the night in a watch room with a thin quilt.
2011-02-25 18:11 The one tailing me was a boy of fifteen or sixteen. I walked several blocks and still couldn’t shake him. I was afraid to run in case he opened fire, so I could only circle around at an unhurried pace. Without noticing it, I drew near the Xining Hotel. The white-helmeted military police were still patrolling there, and the boy immediately dropped farther back. I was thinking about how to avoid the sentries when I suddenly saw my car parked in the hotel courtyard. At once I ran straight toward the guards without another thought.
2011-02-25 23:45 They really were here. When my wife saw me, she burst into tears and clutched her head. Old Ma had been shot. Blade had burns. Last night they were attacked by the Dongguan militia, and outnumbered, Blade set fire to the abandoned oil depot at the repair shop and escaped here. At this point everyone except my wife was wounded. Blade’s burns are mostly on his back, with some areas even reaching superficial second degree, yet he acts as if nothing is wrong. It suddenly struck me that I hadn’t seen him take off his gloves in a very long time.
2011-02-26 00:04 This place had originally been one of the medical sites of the Army Fourth Hospital. Before withdrawing, they received orders from Lanzhou Military Region to hold their ground, and they have not moved since. Orders are orders. They, along with the main hospital, stayed behind. The helicopters are used to shuttle medicine and food gathered from around the city. The orderly in the wards, @gseed12, told me that Lanzhou has been out of contact for twenty days now, and the vehicles sent there have never come back.
2011-02-26 00:24 Twelve, @gseed12, was wearing a German flecktarn jacket embroidered with a Three-Body emblem. He used to run a little military-surplus shop on Shangye Lane. After the disaster began, he joined a neighborhood self-defense patrol, and once there was no one left outside, he came here to work as an orderly. As he put it, being with soldiers makes you feel steadier. There are fewer than sixty people here now, twenty-three of them soldiers. Supplies are still fairly sufficient, but medicine is in desperate shortage.
2011-02-26 00:31 The highest-ranking officer here is a captain surnamed Jin. We have earned their trust, and everything we went through on the road from Chengdu is enough to show how much this city means to us, or at least that is how I explained it. The military doctor treated the punctures in my thigh and replaced the bandages with clean gauze. For the past several hours my wife has not left my side for even a moment; she has been clutching my hand the whole time. I swear I will never again let her vanish from my sight.
2011-02-26 21:31 I spent the whole day lying down and had my dressings changed once. The bullet was removed from Old Ma’s body. Blade kept groaning in pain, though I could tell he was pretending. Only one helicopter came today, because they are almost out of fuel. Twelve says the reason so few of them have been able to keep holding this place is that the daily helicopter traffic still deters the people of Dongguan. If the helicopters stop coming, it will be hard for so many patients here, all regarded by Ma Baoquan as “threats,” to remain safe.
2011-02-27 22:58 This morning the patrol did not go out to gather supplies, because overnight an isolation ditch a meter wide had been dug along both sides of the road outside the gate, too wide for cars to cross. In the distance we could see people in white caps spying on us. Captain Jin led a squad of scouts out on foot, cleared the obstacles, and posted additional lookouts on the high points around the hotel. I also volunteered to spend the day in a corner of the north building. My wounds are superficial. In a few days I should be able to run again.
2011-02-27 23:00 The Xining Hotel’s location is actually poor. In truth it was never a fortress at all, and it sits right at the edge of Dongguan’s sphere of influence, so it is hard not to be viewed with hostility. I told Captain Jin as much. He is a stubborn man. He said that if military orders told him to hold here, then he could not move half a step. But he did agree to post slogans at the hotel gate tomorrow, making clear that we pose absolutely no threat. Eating mutton every day has left my mouth full of heat blisters.
2011-02-28 22:10 Today it warmed up. I took off my long underwear and still felt hot. That is not a good sign. In Qinghai, temperatures like this would be considered early even for April, and the direct consequence is that the dead grass in the courtyard has actually begun to show signs of sprouting. A layer of pale whitish-green shoots has appeared across the ground, lovely in color and yet unspeakably uncanny. In the afternoon a strong wind blew through, carrying with it a fishy stench from the city, like vegetables rotting under their own cover.
2011-02-28 22:21 No helicopter came today. Everything felt very quiet. The distance between here and the hospital happens to be right at the limit of our radio range, and the signal is poor, barely breaking through in fragments. Things over there seem bad. Among the patients they have discovered new six-fingers. The people of Dongguan did not show themselves today. The sentries scavenged several cases of expired milk and sausages from the last remaining Ning Shi supermarket nearby. Only today did I learn that a vice mayor’s family is here as well, along with his driver. The surname is Xu.