“Run.”
The boy stared at her, confused, already opening his mouth to ask why. The old woman didn’t give him time. “The recruiting crew isn’t offering jobs. They’re collecting people for rich men to use. The money comes from the patrons, the lies come from the crew, and once the goods are confirmed, the bleeding starts.”
“Use for what?”
“Blood.” She saw that he still didn’t understand and pushed on. “The price depends on how young the blood is. Five hundred thousand to ten million. After they drain you, the organs go to the black market for another fortune. They have a whole system.”
“Who has a system?” The boy paused, then clarified. “The patrons.”
“Don’t ask so much. Crawl through here and keep going. Hurry.”
I opened my sleepy eyes and turned off the dull movie. Outside, only a few lights were on in the building across from mine. The seventeenth and eighteenth floors had just caught fire; luckily it had been contained before spreading higher. I was flattening my pillow to lie down when a flicker of firelight crossed the window. One of the nineteenth-floor bedrooms was burning too. I couldn’t see anything through the flames, couldn’t tell whether anyone inside had gotten out. The fire grew fiercer. A gust of wind pushed the flames close enough to lick at my curtains. Old Liang rushed over, shut the window hard, and shouted at me: “Call the police!”
All I got was a busy signal. I watched in horror as fire burst out of the windows, bright enough to show every seam in the brickwork, bright enough to make the rain-soaked ground glitter. In the restless light, I saw the recruiting crew. They stood on the slope on the other side of the bridge, holding a white banner: By Imperial Decree—Recruiting Eighty. They didn’t shout or move. They looked frozen, the same fixed smile on every face.
That movie. I pulled out my iPad and opened the player, but there was no history. I opened a search engine and typed from memory—Blizzard… something, something winter? I tried a wildcard. The search engine asked: Were you looking for Winter Is Coming? I clicked the first result, a Douban movie entry. The page said 404 Not Found.
When I looked back, the fire had reached the twentieth floor. No fire truck had come. There was no sound outside at all, as if everyone were still asleep, or as if the fire had never happened. Only I could see the recruiting crew getting closer. Their smiles twisted with the jumping flames.
They were coming to grab me.
“Get up!” My father yanked off my blanket. “Did you forget you have a matchmaking meeting today?”
I put on my jacket without enthusiasm, washed up, and went out with him. At the other family’s door, the door was ajar. My father pushed it open and called, “Lao Zhou! I’ve brought my son. Bring your daughter out so we can talk!” No one answered. From the kitchen came the clang of spatulas against a wok. The moment we stepped over the threshold, a person with shrunken skin and bulging eyes rushed at us, a spatula in each hand. Off to the side, a young woman kept her back to us, stirring something in a huge iron wok.
My father grabbed my sleeve and ran. The street was full of people holding spatulas, faces ashen, eyes protruding. They waved the spatulas weakly, but the instant they saw living people they lunged with frightening speed and bit into arms. Their victims fell quickly and became like them—gray-faced, empty-eyed.
“Get in!” A car pulled up beside us. Lao Fu leaned out. “Don’t just stand there.”
“Lao Fu, what are you doing here?”
He was my coworker. It was Sunday, and I hadn’t expected to run into him on the street. He didn’t turn around. “I’ll explain when we’re safe.”
The car stopped in front of a courtyard. Lao Fu tapped his phone a few times, and a door opened in the transparent glass wall around the yard. We followed him inside and sat in rattan chairs. Lao Fu asked why we had been out there. My father told him what had happened. Lao Fu stared at us, eyes wide. “The zombies have been showing up for days. Don’t you two watch the news?” My father and I looked at each other, equally stunned.
“What about you, Lao Fu?” I asked.
He let out a long breath. “My son was supposed to come back today. I went to the airport to pick him up, but by the time I got there, traffic controls were already in place. He never made it. The plane turned around halfway.”
We talked about a few other things, none of it important.
Around dusk, another female colleague stood outside the glass wall waving. Lao Fu opened the door and let her in. At dinner, my father quietly scraped a small half-spoonful of rice out of my bowl and sprinkled a few pieces of pickled radish on top. Lao Fu smiled apologetically. “No idea how long we’ll be stuck here. We should ration.”
“Lao Fu, what’s that dark pipe?”
I pointed at a pipe about a meter and a half in diameter. It connected to a mound shaped like a grave.
“Oh, that’s my shelter. About thirty square meters underneath.”
“Did you design the glass wall too?”
“Yes. It keeps outside things out without blocking the view, and the top still lets air through.” He looked proud.
“Outside things—zombies? But why haven’t we seen a single one all this time? Since we got here, until sunset, only one person has appeared outside. Her.” I gestured toward the female colleague.
Lao Fu was quiet for a moment. He didn’t answer directly. “Who doesn’t like a space that belongs completely to them? Like when you were a kid, hiding under the blanket on a rainy day with a flashlight. It felt safe.”
I bent my head a little in shame. Who didn’t like a space of their own? Lao Fu had taken us in, and I had pried at him like that.
“How did you get here?” I walked into the kitchen. The female colleague had just finished washing the bowls.
She shook the water from her hands, put the bowls in the cupboard, and turned. “Lao Fu called me. He said the zombie outbreak had started and told me to come here for shelter.”
“When?”
“A little over two hours ago.” She paused. “Do you know what’s going on? I didn’t see a single person on the street.”
I didn’t answer. I took out my phone. The upper-left corner said no service. I turned and found my way to Lao Fu’s study, then pressed the power button on his computer. It was unnaturally smooth. The browser opened on the double-click like a warm start, without a second of waiting. I typed zombies into the search engine. The first page was all encyclopedia entries, films, and images. I clicked News. The latest item was about some zombie movie winning an award a year ago. I typed in the local place name. The page returned 503. I refreshed for about ten seconds until it loaded. The first headline read: Zombie outbreak in City F; government sends military and police to clean up. I clicked the headline. There were only a few sentences and two photos. One photo showed the building across from mine in the background. The nineteenth and twentieth floors were intact. The watermark in the lower right corner said April 28, 2021—today. I went back and searched zombies again. A few new results appeared with similar headlines, but clicking them returned domain cannot be resolved. I tried pinging the search engine’s domain. It returned an internal IP address.
“Lao Fu!” I tapped his shoulder. “I dreamed about you last night.”
He looked up with a kindly smile and asked what I had dreamed. I told him the whole dream, except for the ping. Lao Fu smiled and said nothing.
“You saved us, but if I ever write any of this down, I’m going to make you the villain.”
At that, Lao Fu stood up at once. The smile on his face began to freeze, but it never disappeared. It was exactly the same smile as the one on the faces of the recruiting crew.