Fatty Bang leaned on my shoulder, panting. "Thanks, brother. This woman is damn strong. These people are like zombies."
"Not quite that bad. They're probably just failed products of some drug experiment."
I pulled Fatty Bang out of the center of the fight, my eyes still fixed on that bizarre woman.
Sure enough, seeing I had hit a nerve, she stared at me coldly through the crowd and then charged.
I quickly pushed Fatty Bang away and swung the hoe at her. But her evasive movements were not stiff at all; they were very agile.
I cursed under my breath, "What the hell!"
The woman charged at me again, the gleaming dagger in her hand making my eyes sting.
I grabbed her knife-wielding arm. With a little force, she cried out and the dagger fell to the ground. I kicked it away into an empty space.
The woman laughed strangely, then pulled another dagger from her clothes.
Was this person a porcupine? Why did she have so many quills on her?
I kicked her in the stomach. She clutched her abdomen but quickly charged again.
Fatty Bang tried to help me, swinging a club, but he missed the woman and hit someone else instead.
Her blade was very sharp. I couldn't block in time. A sharp pain shot through my arm, and blood immediately gushed out.
I flew into a rage. I dislocated the woman's arm, and with one hand, grabbed her by the throat and lifted her off the ground.
She looked at me grimly, without a trace of fear. Fresh blood continuously poured from her mouth as her lips moved, her words unintelligible.
I didn't want to take her life, so I threw her to the ground.
With her arm dislocated, the woman's body contorted bizarrely on the ground a few times before she gradually stopped breathing, her face still frozen in that grim smile.
I stood frozen on the spot, a sudden wave of sorrow washing over me.
The village chief had already collapsed in a pool of blood during the melee.
The last words that woman had said were: "Must live."
The village chief did what he did because he wanted to live. This woman, before she died, also wanted to live. The villagers and I, we also want to live. Who isn't struggling just to live...?
Tonight was a nightmare for many people.
This rural place had never seen so many deaths—children, women, men.
At daybreak, the villagers shoveled dirt to cover the bloodstains in the courtyard. After the sun had shone for a while, the thick, metallic smell of blood mixed with a foul stench rose from the yard.
The villagers went from initial horror to eventual numbness and hardening. In these chaotic times, perhaps that mentality was for the best.
I didn't know why I felt a little sad. Perhaps I had become too sentimental lately. I gave a self-deprecating laugh and went to help Fatty Bang.
There was an unspoken agreement among everyone not to mention the strange children who had escaped. I didn't want to know, nor did I want to guess their thoughts anymore. This time, I chose to be silent along with them.
The four or five men and women who had been scratched or bitten had secretly hanged themselves in their homes, then were quietly buried under a mound of yellow earth.
Those strange people were buried on a mountain far away.
The strange disease they carried broke out in a few of the families that had bought the straw mushrooms. Perhaps the virus had lost its potency; the process of dying was excruciatingly long and painful.
With the village chief gone, Uncle Ba, a respected elder in the village, stepped up to manage things.
Following my suggestion, every household boiled rice vinegar to fumigate their houses for disinfection, but this was not a long-term solution.
As it happened, Fatty Bang had to go to the city in a few days to pick up his older sister's family. Uncle Ba asked me to see if any pharmacies were still open and to buy some disinfectants.
After things had temporarily settled down, I drove Fatty Bang to the town.
This rural village had never been shrouded in such a deadly and oppressive atmosphere.
It was nearly evening when we reached the town. We went to the gas station first.
There were hardly any people left at the station. I filled the tank myself. Most of the pumps were empty. We hauled several barrels of diesel onto the truck; this stuff would probably be impossible to find later on.
As we drove deeper into town, the road surface was scorching from the sun. The town was desolate, not a soul in sight, and every house had its doors shut tight.
Occasionally, we could see a few people who resembled the strange ones from our village. Fatty Bang and I were both startled. Could it be that the entire town had been infected with this monstrous disease?
With this question in mind, we drove off the main road and deeper inside. Before long, the people wandering everywhere were being taken away by personnel in pure white protective suits.
Seeing these people, Fatty Bang and I were both relieved and worried. We had finally seen people who gave us a sense of security. In these difficult circumstances, even though we were in a remote place without news, we had not been abandoned.
We had no intention of causing more trouble, nor did we want those people to know of our existence.
We parked the car in a secluded spot, took out the grain, and knocked on the door of a pharmacy tucked away in a corner. Most people here owned their own houses; they were surely still inside.
Fatty Bang and I knocked persistently. About half an hour later, a small window opened.
The person inside was covered from head to toe; we could only see their eyes behind a pair of glasses.
I pointed to the sack of grain on my back, which must have been about fifty kilos, and said to the person inside, "I want to buy some heart medication and a few bottles of disinfectant."
The person hesitated for a moment, then closed the window.
Fatty Bang looked at me and said, "No good. They won't trade."
I shook my head. Not necessarily. The one thing people in town lacked most was grain.
Sure enough, before long, the person opened the door and gestured for us to bring the grain inside.
He gave me half a bag of heart medication, explaining, "There's no disinfectant left in this whole town. There was a strange epidemic a few days ago, and a military unit came. They traded for all the disinfectant in town. I've given you all the medicine I have left."
Just as I thought. The epidemic appeared in town even earlier than it did in our village.