Chapter 3: Deadly Pursuit (2)
Not until the screams from the riverbank slowly faded, turning into guttural gasps, and then into total silence.
I still didn't leave the mudflats, kept waiting—Golden ring hornets, killer bees. After their nest was trampled, a swarm's pursuit could last over an hour. Right now, the enraged colony was still raging nearby.
Killing gods along the way, slaughtering buddhas too.
I struggled to open my mud-crusted eyes and glared at the sky above the riverbank, watching it darken bit by bit, until brilliant stars gradually revealed their luster.
Only then did I crawl out of the thick mire, like some lost ghost, and make my way onto the embankment.
The whole time I was trembling—from the cold of staying too long in the mud water, from hunger, from fear, and also... excitement.
They were dead, I was certain.
Being stung by a massive swarm of golden ring hornets would swiftly rob a person of mobility. The violent toxicity would trigger acute organ failure in a short time. At the moment I'd nearly stepped on the nest, I'd clearly seen the scale of the colony clustered beneath the dirt ledge—demon-like black-and-yellow adult hornets covering a dense cluster of exits.
The two men had run a hundred-plus meters along the riverbank before collapsing one after the other in a rock-strewn patch of grass, their breathing already stopped.
What a shame they ran the wrong direction. If they'd gone left, they could have thrown themselves into the mud where I was hiding.
Such a cold thought.
The two spots on my back and neck where I'd been stung throbbed violently, and my head swam. I reached back and scratched once, then couldn't bear it and sat down right there, in front of a man's corpse, unable to suppress a muffled laugh.
3.
The moon came out, illuminating the swollen, distorted face of the dead man.
I studied him carefully. The hunter's appearance was hard to make out anymore, but I vividly remembered the greedy, ecstatic look on his face when he spotted me.
A hundred thousand yuan.
That was the price Shane had promised them for capturing me and bringing me back.
I thought about this in silence, then recalled the last time I saw Shane at Little Golden Port—how he'd cried in front of Ahab because Mongo was driving bamboo splinters under my fingernails.
What was he crying about? Afraid I'd die and he couldn't get those dollars back?
He still hadn't given up.
How persistent.
Little Golden Port was back in Ahab's hands. Would Shane stay in Northern Myanmar, or would he throw in with the D-Zone?
...
I rested for a while, then with effort pushed the corpse and stripped a backpack off him. Gave it a heft—substantial weight. The other man also had a pack, and I unceremoniously took that one too.
First I took inventory of the supplies—
Four whole compressed biscuit bars, plus a half-opened pack, seven or eight chocolate bars, two tins of luncheon meat, three and a half bottles of water, two packs of cigarettes and a lighter, a bundle of climbing rope, a dagger, a machete, two phones.
A detailed mountain region map.
I stuffed half a compressed biscuit into my mouth, chewed a few times, washed it down with several gulps of water, then finished a chocolate bar, and only then began to feel some strength return.
I took out the items I'd hidden on my body—fortunately, everything was wrapped in plastic bags, undamaged—and carefully packed them all into one backpack.
The mud on my body was gradually drying in the river wind, caking into a shell that clung tight and felt unbearable.
I peeled off my completely ruined clothes and tossed them aside, then waded barefoot into the river and washed myself thoroughly.
With water dripping from my hair, I shook my head a few times, pulled on the dead hunter's clothes. The pant legs were too long—I hacked off a hand-span with the dagger to make them barely fit.
The thin men's jacket zipped all the way up to my chin. Feeling how empty it hung on my frame, I rolled up the sleeves to my elbows, gathered up my discarded filthy clothes, and threw them into the river, watching them drift away until they disappeared completely.
With all my supplies secured, I shouldered the pack and left the mudflats without a backward glance.
After acquiring the hunters' supplies, I headed south according to the map, walking for four days.
Actually, Little Golden Port was in the east-southeastern part of Northern Myanmar. The southeast direction was closest to the border, but I didn't dare continue in that direction—deep fingernail marks gouged the map over several towns and villages, and Yin Valley was one of them.
The marks were deep, scored repeatedly. The map's previous owner must have been so agitated whenever he mentioned those places.
Lawless drug dens, warlord checkpoints—the entire area was likely a zone of frequent armed clashes.
Going south meant detouring at least twice the distance, but with relatively sufficient food and water, the long way had become the safer choice.
In four days, I covered roughly fifty or sixty li, basically crossing over a mountain range the locals called "Nandu." From a high ridge I'd glimpsed a city-state in the distance, but I detoured around it.
By the fifth day, I'd consumed more than half my food. Worse, I was experiencing intermittent abdominal pain and diarrhea.
At its worst, the cramping was so severe I could barely take a step.
Because I'd been drinking untreated water along the way, I worried it might be dysentery. But the symptoms came and went without worsening as much as I'd feared. Most of the time I could still walk—just weak and short of breath, needing longer and longer rest breaks.
I grew anxious—afraid I'd run out of food before getting out. The more anxious I became, the more mistakes I made. I nearly sprained an ankle climbing a steep slope.
That noon, after pushing myself to the top with everything I had, I sat on the ground gasping, my hands trembling uncontrollably.
A premonition gripped me: if I didn't get medicine soon, I might truly not make it out.
Worse news—I seemed to have taken the wrong path.
The illness must have clouded my judgment. I'd gone off course at a mountain gully a day and a half ago.
It wasn't until the terrain felt wrong—nothing matching the map—that I realized my mistake, but I'd already been walking the wrong way for a day and a half.
I had three phones, but for some reason, only Sylvie's phone maintained any signal. The other two, taken from the hunters, had gone completely dead. Sylvie's phone still had one faint bar.
Battery down to 12%. I turned it on anyway and loaded Google Maps, confirmed my position, memorized the coordinates, and snapped off a wooden splinter to punch a small round mark on the paper map at the corresponding location.
I was way, way off course.
The live map was draining power fast, dropping to 8% in what felt like an instant. I shut it down again.
I sat in place for a while, helpless, then forced myself to keep dragging my feet forward.
4.
The slope had reached its end. The dense forest thinned, grass bending in waves under the wind. After pushing through the dark understory all morning, the sight of sunlight lifted my spirits.
At the edge of the meadow, a patch of low shrubs grew, some bearing tiny black-crystalline berries and white flowers like clusters of rice beads.
Fire berry... ?
The fruit was edible, and the plant might treat diarrhea. I remembered my grandmother brewing this herb for me when I was little.
Heartened, I ran a few steps and reached out to tear at the gnarled stems and leaves.
Wait! Wait... nothing ahead, it was empty!
Maybe dizziness from the diarrhea had slowed my reactions. By the time my brain registered that ahead was a cliff edge, my feet had already stepped onto loose soil despite my effort to stop.
Grabbing fistfuls of the herb, I tumbled down like a rolling gourd.
...
A snake. A snake slid past my neck.
That was the first thing I registered when consciousness returned. I turned my head with difficulty and caught sight of a black-and-yellow striped tail vanishing past my cheek, darting in alarm beneath a tangle of old tree roots.
I stared blankly upward at the layered canopy of leaves and vines.
Not scared at all. Really. What's there to be scared of about a snake?
All things have spirits, all things have feelings.
...Mr. Snake, please don't bite me. I still have a few scores to settle out there.
I'll bite you back if you do. Honestly.
After muttering this silently for a while, I gathered a bit of courage and patted myself down with my free hand. Good—no other cold, slithering friends hiding anywhere.
Bracing against the ground, I pushed myself into a sitting position. Surprisingly, nothing hurt terribly in my bones—except for a gash behind my ear down to my neck, which was bleeding freely and burning like fire.
A branch had slashed me open during the fall.
I pressed on the wound. Not deep, and the bleeding had mostly stopped on its own.
I had no disinfectant and no clean bandages, so I didn't dare touch it. Just let it air out.
This was a streambed hidden beneath overgrown trees and plants. The cliff I'd fallen from wasn't very high—two or three meters at most, from what I could remember. I'd ended up here because the cliff face gave way to a steep slope below, and the momentum of the fall had sent me tumbling, crashing through brush and snapping saplings all the way down to the valley floor.
I'd blacked out from the shock and a blow to the back of my head.
The stream was thin and shallow, just a few rivulet threads trickling over stones.