The Courtyard House: The Little Red Devil Returning from the Peninsula

The night was still deep on Beishan Road. The wind wasn't just blowing, it was howling, whistling down your neck like someone was stuffing ice shards inch by inch into your collar. When someone opened their mouth, short puffs of white breath escaped, only to be torn apart by the wind before they could dissipate completely.

Halfway up the mountain, two Type 92 infantry guns were wrapped in burlap. A dozen soldiers pulled and pushed, the gun wheels grinding over the frozen ground with a creaking sound. Zhao Tieshan squatted on the left side of the breech, his fingernails digging open the first seal. Beneath the seal, the bullets were neatly stacked, their brass color gleaming coldly in the darkness. His fingers paused on the bullets for a moment. The first time he pressed these cartridge cases, the primer had burned his palm; his fingertips still remembered it, like a lingering scar. He then tore it all the way through.

Old Zhou came over from the side, staring at the box. His throat moved, and the bloodshot in his eyes was even more pronounced than in Zhao Tieshan's eyes—he hadn't slept a wink all night.

"Forty shots?"

Zhao Tieshan didn't look up: "Fifty-two were made in three days. Six shots were fired, four had uneven propellant loading, and two were the wrong size."

"Then they're all useless?"

"Locked back in the kiln." Zhao Tieshan finally looked up, his eyes bloodshot from staying up all night. "Only cannonballs can be stored here."

Old Zhou reached out to lift the edge of the suitcase. Zhao Tieshan blocked the suitcase with his arm.

"You know how to read batch numbers?"

"I don't know how to read batch numbers," Old Zhou grinned, with bits of dry rations stuck between his teeth, the bits of which were hard to tell if they were from yesterday or the day before. "I know how to fight the Japanese."

"Then wait for the cannon fire. Don't touch my bullets."

Old Zhou withdrew his hand and wiped it on his trouser leg. He didn't say anything more. Across the mountain path, the Shouyang East Outpost lay halfway up the mountain. Three bunkers blocked the main road, with low walls on both sides wrapping around it like mud belts. Last night, Zhi Zi sneaked in and counted five machine guns and two grenade launchers, with about 140 Japanese soldiers inside. The number was given casually, but Zhao Tieshan did the math in his head: 140 men, and they had 800, so they weren't at a disadvantage. But attacking an outpost wasn't about counting heads.

Zhao Weiguo pressed the map against a rock. The rock was icy cold, but the calluses on his palms didn't feel the chill. Dampness seeped from the cracks in the rock, like someone secretly breathing underneath. He looked down at the map, the tip of his pencil making a shallow mark at a bend in the mountain path.

"Eight hundred per battalion, front."

Old Zhou squatted down, his knees pressed against the frozen earth. The clods of earth hurt his kneecaps, so he moved half an inch to the side, only to feel his knees getting even colder afterward: "I'll go up as soon as the cannons stop."

"The artillery will stop for two minutes, then the armored vehicles will proceed."

"That Japanese soldier has enough time to climb back to the firing port."

"So there was a machine gun mounted on the vehicle."

Old Zhou clicked his tongue, squeezed a handful of frozen mud, and then released it. The mud, containing ice shards, melted into black liquid in his hand, trickling down between his fingers. He looked at the black liquid, then suddenly laughed, a silent laugh, his lips twitching upwards before collapsing back down: "Is that what you call armor? Shouldn't armor be—"

"What you call them doesn't matter." Zhao Weiguo tapped his pencil on a bend in the mountain road, leaving a dent in the paper. "Three vehicles, only fifty meters from the outside of the wall. No ramming the gate, no climbing the slope, no chasing anyone. Engineers follow the vehicles, and the battalion follows the engineers. If the vehicles stop, the people go around them. Anyone who nails an entire company to the mountain road for three steel plates, I'll skin them alive."

Old Zhou was taken aback. His lips moved as if to object, but he swallowed his words. He glanced at Zhao Weiguo; the boy's face was expressionless, his fifteen-year-old face belying the words of a thirty-year-old veteran. Old Zhou uttered a muffled "...I understand."

Duan Peng's Third Battalion had already circled around to the northeast of the stronghold. There were only dry ditches and rocky slopes there, no roads, and the Japanese thought no one would come from that direction. As soon as the artillery fired, the Third Battalion blocked the retreat route to Shouyang. A company remained at the mountain pass, and the reinforcements from Taiyuan hadn't dispersed; no one could say for sure if they would come back. Zhao Gang plugged the phone into the artillery position; the wire cut through his fingers, frozen and numb, as if it were digging into his bones. He tried to pull his fingers together, but they wouldn't obey him; it took him a while to finally grip the receiver.

"The Third Battalion has arrived. They have 24 demolition charges and 12 explosive packs."

Zhao Tieshan chimed in, "Both vehicles can cover the full distance. Vehicle number one has had its driveshaft replaced, and the right front wheel hub is still burning hot; it can only travel a maximum of six li."

"From Zangchegou to the wall?"

"Four and a half li."

That's enough.

"When will you come back?" Zhao Tieshan asked.

Zhao Weiguo glanced at him. In that glance, half a sentence stuck in his throat: Don't think about coming back yet. He only said, "Let it live to the wall first."

The mountain wind swirled pebbles past the gun emplacement. No one spoke. A stifling heat seemed to rise from the soles of their feet into the frozen ground.

Before dawn, searchlights swept across the gun emplacements. When the beams of light touched faces, everyone buried their chins in their collars. The light was cold, a bluish-white, casting the same color on people's faces as on the faces of the dead. Zhao Weiguo raised his hand. His hand hovered in mid-air for about half a second before falling.

The first reloaded round was fired into the breech. The breech closed, metal against metal, a muffled thud that traveled up to his feet. Zhao Tieshan stood to the left of the breech, a recorder clutched in his hand. He wasn't looking at the bunker, only at the gun barrel and the locking mechanism. The cold wind whipped the recorder around, and he pressed a corner down with his little finger. His fingers were white with cold, his fingernails tinged with purple.

"Cannon No. 1, three shots for calibration."

Zhao Weiguo's hand fell.

The first shot hit the top edge of the bunker, sending half a sandbag flying more than ten meters. Clods of earth slammed into the stones in front of the gun emplacement with a series of thuds. One soldier instinctively ducked his neck, his head hitting the gun wheel. He winced in pain but didn't utter a sound.

"Lower it by half a foot!" Zhao Tieshan roared.

The second shot penetrated the lower edge of the firing port, causing a cloud of dust to bulge out of the entire wall. Two Japanese soldiers tumbled down the slope with the broken bricks; one stopped halfway down, while the other continued crawling, his legs dragging, like a dog with a broken spine. No one paid him any attention. The third shot landed on the left side of the bunker.

It missed. The shell blasted a crater in the earthen slope, turning up the frozen soil and revealing the dark red core beneath.

Zhao Tieshan lowered his head and made a note. The pencil tip paused on the paper, and the handwriting was crooked: "Category 2, Third issue slightly to the left." His hand was a little stiff, but the force with which he wrote did not loosen, and each stroke was as if he were carving.

Old Zhou lay prone behind the earthen embankment, his fingers digging a trench in the frozen mud, his fingernails filled with black grime. The mud was mixed with yesterday's gun ash, and digging deeper, he could smell the pungent odor of gunpowder. He glanced towards the gun emplacements, his cheeks bulging from clenching his teeth: "Two emplacements have already collapsed, what's the point of continuing the inspection!"

Zhao Weiguo took the microphone but didn't speak immediately. He glanced at the watch Zhao Tieshan had kept; it had three lines of text, the first two checked, the third crossed out. Then he spoke, his voice coming through the receiver with static, as if drifting from another world: "Old Zhou, listen up. We made the shells ourselves. In the first battle, we need to make sure every single one is fired correctly. If you dare show yourself before the shelling stops, I'll have the reserves take your place."

There was a two-second silence below the earthen embankment. A muffled sound rose from beneath the frozen ground—Old Zhou's curse, so low it was almost inaudible: "...Damn it."

The person didn't move. Old Zhou's fingers were still digging into the mud ditch, digging even deeper.

The second gun was then calibrated. After six shots, the data from both guns were combined. Zhao Tieshan adjusted the propellant charge, his fingers were a little stiff from the cold, and when he tried to adjust the charge, his fingers wouldn't obey him, and the propellant pack fell off once. He picked it up, wiped the dust off his trouser leg, and put it back in. He didn't say a word throughout the entire process.

"We can fight."

The wooden crates were all opened. The bullets gleamed in the darkness, like rows of brass teeth.

The two cannons fired three rounds at a time, then stopped to check the breechblocks and wipe away the gunpowder residue from the sides of the chambers. The residue clung to the cloth, shiny black, and smelled like burnt hair. The fourth shot shattered the lower firing port; someone screamed inside, but was buried under bricks before the scream was completely cut off. The seventh shot knocked down the grenade launcher position; the launcher flew up, spun in the air, and landed on the earthen slope. The eleventh shot struck the side of the second bunker, cracking a large hole in the brick wall. Someone tried to run out, but after only a dozen steps, a battalion of machine gunners pinned him back into the trench. Blood splattered on the edge of the trench, quickly absorbed by the frozen soil, leaving only a dark red mark.

Two grenades landed to the right of the gun emplacement. The first one knocked down a mortar carrier, who slumped behind the gun wheel, unable to get up for a long time. The second one severed the telephone line, the end dangling on the clod of earth, hissing and sparking like a dying snake.

The communications officer picked up the spool and was about to charge straight in. Zhao Gang grabbed him, his grip so strong that the officer stumbled and nearly fell onto the gun emplacement. Zhao Gang's voice was forced out through clenched teeth: "Go down the reverse slope!"

"We need to take an extra two hundred steps!"

"That's still faster than losing a leg."

The communications officer hesitated for a moment, then turned and ran. Zhao Gang watched his retreating figure, wiping the sweat from his trouser seam with his fingers. The eighteenth shot landed, and the uppermost bunker finally collapsed. The roof caved in first, as if someone had hollowed it out. The front wall followed, crashing into the mountain path with a deafening roar, the rising dust obscuring half the hillside. The machine gun and its crew were buried under the bricks and stones, only half the barrel protruding, the sling still dangling from the broken wood, swaying twice before stopping.

Zhao Tieshan glanced at his pocket watch, its surface covered in a layer of gunpowder ash, but the hands were still ticking beneath: "Twenty-seven minutes. Two shots missed by half a foot, sixteen shots were effective."

"Leave eleven rounds for each of the two cannons," Zhao Weiguo said.

"Aren't you going to continue?"

"The car has left."

Three short whistles rang out from the valley floor. The whistles were so sharp they were piercing, like needles drilling into eardrums.

The tarpaulin was lifted. Three armored vehicles emerged from the hiding place. The steel plates on the vehicles were of different colors, some gray and some black, with rows of rivets nailed to the seams. Only Czech-made machine guns were mounted on the roofs. They didn't look like iron beasts, but rather like three iron boxes stitched together, with rough edges still showing through the seams. The commander poked his head out, a cold wind blowing into his collar. He hunched his neck and pulled his hat brim down.

But as soon as the metal box hit the road, all the machine guns in the outpost turned around. Bullets pounded the steel plates of the truck ahead, the sound as dense as the pounding of hammers. Sparks flew from the front of the truck all the way to the door, splashing into the mud and extinguishing themselves, but landing on the commander's face, burning a few white spots. The commander blinked, but didn't rub his eyes.

"Don't go in a straight line! Go left!"

The car swerved sharply to the side of the road, its right wheel rubbing over a rock, causing the entire vehicle to tilt. The machine gunner on the roof slammed his shoulder against the steel plate, coughing up a mouthful of metallic-tasting spittle that splattered onto the bolt. He didn't bother wiping it away, the muzzle still sweeping the firing port. Tracer rounds drew bright lines in the darkness, some blindingly bright, others eerily dark.

The second vehicle followed suit, running over the first one. The third vehicle lagged behind, its right front wheel starting to smoke, the smoke carrying a burnt smell, like a charred shoe sole. Zhao Tieshan grabbed his binoculars, pressing them against his eyes, the frames leaving two red marks on his eye sockets: "The wheel rim is overheating!"

How far is it from the wall?

"Seventy steps!"

"Stop after turning around the earthen slope, then continue firing the machine gun."

A burst of Type 92 heavy machine gun bullets swept through. The side panel of the first vehicle shuddered violently, two rivets were knocked off, and a thin gash appeared in the seam. The ammunition handler inside clutched his face and fell. The steel plate hadn't been penetrated, but shards of metal had seeped in, and blood slowly seeped through his fingers, staining his trouser leg a dark red. He didn't scream, only let out a muffled groan.

The train commander kicked the driver's seat: "Turn around! Don't spray it with the side seams!"

The car swerved, its thick front end blocking the beams. Two Czech-made rifles fired alternately, sending mud and debris flying behind the low wall, splattering onto the commander's neck without him noticing. His neck was covered in mud and blood, indistinguishable from its source.

Old Zhou had been waiting for this moment. A lump formed in his throat, neither rising nor falling, making his chest ache. He glanced at the soldier beside him; the boy's face was as white as paper, his lips trembling as he counted. Old Zhou didn't count; he stared at the bullet holes on the side of the armored vehicle, counting the sparks. One, two, three…

"First Battalion!"

More than 800 men split into three groups and charged out. The first two groups followed the armored vehicles, while the third group climbed up the rocky slope on the right. One soldier ran too fast and was pulled back by his own men to avoid being hit by bullets. The one who pulled him was an old soldier, expressionless, who simply cursed, "Watch your step!" before rushing forward. The engineers, carrying demolition charges, ran at the forefront, lying down every ten steps or so to wait for the machine gun to be reloaded before charging forward again. One engineer hit his head on a rock as he lay down, blood streaming down his forehead. He wiped it away and kept running, the blood smeared on his face, making it look like half of his face was painted red.

A grenade hit the wall, knocking three people over. The soldier behind him took the demolition charge, didn't look back, and continued running along the base of the wall, his shoes slipping on the rubble, taking one step at a time, as if walking on ice.

"Left side of the gap!" the monk shouted from behind the car, his voice hoarse and like a torn cloth.

Two explosive charges were driven into the foundation of the wall. With a loud bang, the low wall collapsed, a gap of more than two zhang (approximately 6.6 meters). Before the rubble had even settled, Old Zhou and his men had already rushed in. The soles of his boots scalded the hot brick dust, burning his feet. He inhaled deeply; the air was thick with saltpeter and brick dust, stinging his lungs. Gunfire erupted simultaneously to the northeast of the stronghold. Duan Peng's Third Battalion first destroyed the communications room, then blocked the path to Shouyang. More than twenty Japanese soldiers had just rushed out the back door when they ran into two light machine guns behind the rocky slope. The ones in front plunged into the ditch and never rose again. The ones behind hesitated for a moment, then turned and ran back, only to be hit by a grenade from the Third Battalion, exploding at the base of the wall.

Armored vehicles were in front. The Third Battalion was behind. The remaining Japanese soldiers were forced into the barracks. A sergeant led a dozen men back into the warehouse, grenades being thrown out of the window cracks one after another. The First Battalion charged back at the gate, seven men fell, the last one collapsing onto the threshold, his hands still gripping the door frame, his fingers digging into the cracks, his nails twisted. Old Zhou wanted to lead more men. Zhao Gang grabbed his belt, his nails digging into the fabric, making Old Zhou's waist tighten.

"The cannon is still there."

"How can we fight when we're so close?"

"Don't attack the warehouse, attack the wall next to it."

The artillerymen pushed a Type 92 cannon to the corner of the mountain road and switched to direct fire. A shell slammed into the brick wall next to the warehouse, blasting a hole big enough for a person to crawl through, and brick dust splattered all over Old Zhou's face. Old Zhou spat out a broken tooth—he didn't know when it had gotten stuck.

The monk led a dozen or so soldiers inside. A burst of short, rapid gunfire erupted from within, as dense as popping beans, or like someone hammering nails. A rifle was thrown out first. Then a second, a third, the butts hitting the bricks with dull thuds. Eleven Japanese soldiers emerged, their arms raised haphazardly. The last sergeant, his hand still in his pocket, was struck down by the monk's rifle butt, his face pressed to the ground, where he lay motionless for a long time. The monk, panting heavily, his chest heaving, glanced down at the sergeant, didn't fire a finishing shot, but simply spat.

At nine o'clock in the morning, the gunfire stopped. It stopped abruptly. Just moments before, the gunfire had been deafening; now, only the sound of the wind and someone panting in the distance remained. The panting was intermittent, like a broken bellows. Old Zhou stood at the warehouse doorway, his hands gripping the doorframe, which was still stained with blood. He looked down at his hands; they were trembling so badly he could barely hold them up. He pulled his hands back and wiped them on his trouser leg.

All three bunkers collapsed. Two machine gun positions were blown apart by artillery fire, and three breaches were blasted in the wall. The First and Third Battalions cleared out the remaining enemy forces six miles deep, pursuing them as far as the fork in the road towards Shouyang, but did not go any further. Zhao Gang squatted under the ruins, scribbling in his notebook with a pencil. The pencil tip broke twice; he bit off the wood shavings with his teeth and started writing again. Wood shavings stuck to his lips; he licked them off, but couldn't get them off. The wind blew the pages of his notebook around, and he used his knee to hold them down.

"Ninety-two Japanese soldiers were killed, thirty-one were captured, and seventeen escaped. There were five machine guns, two grenade launchers, and one hundred and three rifles. The warehouse contained twenty-seven barrels of gasoline and forty-six boxes of machine gun ammunition."

He finished speaking, the pen nib hovering over the paper, without looking up. A gust of wind rushed into his collar, and he hunched his neck, the movement a beat slow, as if his body was lagging behind his mind. Zhao Weiguo: "Ours?"

Zhao Gang's throat tightened, as if someone were choking him. He swallowed, but couldn't swallow it down; his Adam's apple bobbed. "Eighteen dead. Thirteen seriously wounded, twenty-eight lightly wounded." He added, his voice so low it was almost blown away by the wind, the last word shattering like a shard of porcelain falling to the ground, "Sappers, seven of them haven't returned."

The wind lifted a corner of the paper, and Zhao Gang pressed it down with his arm, his knuckles turning white. He stopped writing; the pencil hung there, the ink at the tip spreading to form an ever-growing black dot.

Old Zhou sat by the broken wall, still clutching the unlit fuse in his hand, his palms sweating and his knuckles white. He looked down at the mud on his shoes; the mud had dried and cracked into pieces. He remained silent for a long time. He wanted to say something, opened his mouth, then closed it again. The words he swallowed swirled in his throat, turning into a silent sigh.

Zhao Weiguo walked over and squatted down next to him. He squatted in the same position as Lao Zhou, knees against his chest, hands on his knees. He looked at the fuse in Lao Zhou's hand, which was deformed from being gripped so tightly, with fingerprints on its outer surface.

"If we had rushed those two minutes earlier," Zhao Weiguo said, his voice low and broken by the wind, "you know how many more people would have died."

Old Zhou craned his neck, wanting to retort, but opened his mouth and then closed it again. He glanced at the line of words on Zhao Gang's notebook, his eyes fixed on it, and his throat bobbed: "...I've got it."

"Don't remember what I said," Zhao Weiguo's voice lowered, as if speaking to himself, "Remember where the artillery fires, where the vehicles run over. Only then can people go."

Old Zhou looked up, his gaze falling on the densely packed bullet holes on the vehicle's body. The holes were like pockmarks, some large enough to fit a fist, others only the size of a fingernail. The paint on the steel plates had peeled off, revealing the rust beneath. After a long pause, he managed to stammer, "Next time, I'll keep an eye on the gun flag."

Zhao Tieshan was leading his men to dismantle the side panel of the first vehicle. The seam hadn't been drilled through, but three rivets were loose, and a crack more than two inches long had appeared on the inside of the steel plate, the edges of which were fresh metal and sharp to the touch. He picked up a piece of chalk, circled the crack, and wrote the word "useless" next to it. Chalk dust fell into the crack, white dust embedded in the black lines, like a scar.

The tank commander, growing anxious, leaned closer. His hat brim was askew, and his face was streaked with sweat and gunfire ash: "This baton could stop bullets, how did it become useless?"

"It's this plate that's ruined, not the car." Zhao Tieshan tapped the crack, producing a hollow, muffled sound, like tapping on a coffin lid. "If another series of hits, the hole will tear open from the rivet holes. We need to go back and change the rivet spacing, and the welds need to be done differently." He paused, exhaling a puff of white breath. "Every plate needs to have a name, a record of which plate was hit by which bullet. Otherwise, next time it won't be a plate that gets hit, it will be a person."

Zhao Weiguo turned his head: "Where are the shells?"

Zhao Tieshan closed the record board, its surface blackened and shiny by the gunfire. "Twenty-nine rounds used, eleven left. No misfires, no barrel explosions, and the three that went astray can all be traced back to their batches." He paused, his breath condensing in the cold air like a lingering wisp of soul. "That's enough to expand a reloading line. But we don't have enough primers, copper, or skilled workers. We can only manage fifteen rounds a day at most."

"Let's fire 15 shots first."

Zhao Tieshan glanced at him, his eyes conveying a half-spoken message: someone will surely complain about the slowness. He didn't say anything, only his lips twitched downwards.

Zhao Weiguo didn't take it, turning to look at Lao Zhou. Lao Zhou's face darkened, and he slammed the broken fuse on the ground, kicking up a small patch of dry dirt: "Why are you looking at me? I'm listening for the gunfire now!"

Someone nearby chuckled, then quickly swallowed it back. The laughter was so short it was like a fart, vanishing instantly in the cold wind.

The eighteen fallen soldiers had been carried to the side of the mountain path, and blankets were laid on them one by one. Underneath the blankets, some men were still clutching the handles of explosive charges, their fingers stiff and hooked, impossible to pry open. The sapper platoon leader squatted there, feeling each of their name tags on their chests. When he reached the third one, he paused, his fingertips lingering on the engraving. The engraving read "Wang Tiezhu," three simple characters, yet deeply carved. The sapper platoon leader didn't look up, but his shoulders trembled slightly, a very slight tremor, like the wind ruffling the blankets.

"Remember the full name," Zhao Weiguo said. He didn't walk over; he stood still, his voice carried away but amplified by the wind.

Zhao Gang nodded and added another line to his notebook. His hand trembled as he wrote, and the characters were crooked and uneven, like a child learning to write: "Add another twenty catties of grain to each family."

"The seven engineering units," Zhao Weiguo added, pausing for a long time, as if the words were circling around on his lips before finally coming out, "...add tools and draft animals. No slips of paper to settle accounts."

At noon, the Independent Regiment's flag was planted atop the ruins of the tallest bunker. The wind whipped the flag's corners, making it crackle, and the bullet holes on the flag bulged like open mouths. Zhao Weiguo walked up, stepping on the broken bricks. The bricks were slippery under his feet; he carefully steadied himself before taking a step. Beyond the eastern mountain pass, the Zhengtai Railway stretched along the mountainside towards Yangquan. A small section of the rails gleamed in the sunlight, silvery and shiny, like a line drawn across the gray mountainside. In the distance, black smoke billowed from trains, trailing slowly along the mountain line, dissipating like a stick of incense burning to its end.

Two infantry guns were parked on the mountain road. Three armored vehicles were riddled with bullet holes; the right front wheel of one had been removed, the rim still warm to the touch. Engineers widened the gap, their pickaxes striking the rocks, sparks flying everywhere. Signalmen re-laid cables, the wires winding around the reverse slope, the outer layer worn away by the sharp edges of the rocks, exposing the copper wires underneath. The medical team carried the wounded back, the groans on the stretchers muffled, as if rising from underground.

Zhao Gang stood beside him, gazing at the vehicle riddled with bullet holes below. The sunlight shone on the holes, making their edges gleam like open eyes. He stared for a while, then asked, "Is this what you call joint operations?"

Zhao Weiguo shook his head: "Not even close."

"What's wrong with it?"

Zhao Weiguo didn't answer immediately. He stepped on the broken bricks, the heat from the gunpowder still rising from the cracks, burning the soles of his shoes, making him want to jump up, but he held back. He tapped the black smoke from the section of the Zhengtai line with the tip of his pencil, the tip shimmering in the sunlight: "Not enough artillery, not enough vehicles. Telephone lines snap with a single bomb, and the engineers are too close to the vehicles—most of today's casualties are on the engineers."

He put the pencil away, twirled it around his knuckles, and the pencil ash stuck to his fingers like a layer of mud that hadn't been washed off: "But the road, you're on the right track."

A mountain wind blew in through the breach in the bunker, whipping up gunpowder ash and splashing it all over their faces. Ash got into their eyes, but Zhao Weiguo blinked without rubbing them. He looked at the distant section of railway track, gleaming in the sunlight like a silver snake winding its way towards Yangquan. He put his hands in his pockets, where he found the shell recording sheets Zhao Tieshan had given him; the corners of the sheets were digging into his thighs.

"Next, Zhengtai Road."

The wind tore his words to shreds, scattering them along the mountain path. Zhao Gang didn't hear the last few words, but he didn't ask. He simply closed the notebook, inserted the pencil into the wire loop, and ignored the bent wire.

On the mountain path, someone began to sing. It was an old tune, the words indistinct and the melody off-key, but it floated in the wind like an unbroken thread. Zhao Weiguo listened without turning around. He stood atop the bunker, his shadow nailed to the broken bricks by the sunlight, short and stubborn, like someone who hadn't fully grown yet was already thinking far ahead.