Chapter 3: Deadly Pursuit (3)
I'd landed on soft mud carpeted with years of silt and rotting leaves.
I wobbled to my feet but couldn't straighten fully—in this rarely visited valley floor, plants grew with aggressive abandon, countless branches and leaves jostling overhead, pressing almost down to the ground.
Hunched over, I dragged my aching legs through the dim light, shuffling slowly toward brightness.
A few hundred meters on, the ferns thinned, shrubs gave way to taller, more widely spaced trees, and I could finally stand upright. A few dozen paces more, following the stream's flow, I stepped onto a rocky riverbank.
The current was slow, smooth as a jade ribbon, but deep in places, some stretches an opaque blue-green.
My guts cramped again. I sat on a rock in a cold sweat, waited for the pain to pass, then scooped up river water to wash the mud and blood from my face and hands.
The sun had disappeared, probably blocked by the mountains to the west.
I washed my hands mechanically. After the terror had drained away, my mind went slack, unable to muster any spirit.
A kind of secret despair even crept in—maybe I'd never get out again. And even if I did, so what? What difference was there between being alive and being dead? Nobody cared about this anyway.
Thoughts like those.
I scrubbed my hands until they were cold and red, then slowly stopped, spreading them flat on my knees to dry.
In that instant, a voice in my head kept cycling the same refrain—I'm so tired, I don't want to walk anymore.
A roaring, buzzing clamor filled my ears, so loud I couldn't help but clutch my head.
As if someone had cast a fishhook from midair, snagging my soul and yanking it upward, leaving me swaying, suspended overhead.
I looked down at myself with cold indifference.
Why this stubborn refusal to yield? Why this refusal to accept defeat? Why keep living? Why endure so much suffering?
Was it hard? Did I regret it? Was it worth it?
I despised myself—
If you're going to be this cowardly, why fight so desperately to survive? Even after escaping the devil's den, they still shattered your spine. You can't even stand up and keep walking?
What's there to be so precious about.
Many people died at Little Golden Port.
Died in other unknown places.
Bones stacked on bones, vengeful spirits crammed against vengeful spirits.
One more wouldn't matter, you useless thing.
A cold shiver shot up from the back of my neck. I trembled several times, and the noise, the roaring, the whispering in my mind receded like a tide.
I remembered Cry pushing me with her bony claw of a hand. She said, Run!
The pressure of that push still lingered on my back.
Sylvie's rose-red dress fluttered in the wind. Her voice leaked from pale, petal-like lips—
Little madwoman, whatever you do, don't look back.
I had looked back. Not only that—I was still chained in place.
The tide vanished without a trace. I slapped myself twice, hard, and used the pain to haul myself to my feet, swaying.
Don't look back.
You received a rare and heavy hope from hell. You need to cradle it, hold it in your mouth, carry it into the light.
Let it grow. Let it bloom.
I zipped up my jacket, watching the small cloud of sediment I'd stirred in the river wash away, clear water settling again, fine grains of sand occasionally catching glints of light.
Tiny, impossible-to-ignore flecks of gold.
I narrowed my eyes.
5.
By the tenth day, I'd hiked over a hundred li along Northern Myanmar's southeastern edge, reaching the territory of Lashio, and finished my last half-portion of flatbread.
Now out of food, I had no choice but to risk approaching inhabited areas.
Many small villages in Myanmar still had no electricity—just a few households scattered across flat ground carved out by rivers.
I stole dried fish and bean noodles that local women had hung to dry behind their houses, and took eggs that ducks had laid by the riverbank.
On that, I walked another three or four days. By evening, I came upon a logging camp.
I'd been starving for over twenty hours. I hid at the edge of the camp, crouching behind stacks of damp logs.
Myanmar's rainy season wasn't over yet—it wasn't peak logging time. Only three or four workers were guarding the grounds. Before dusk, they sat under a makeshift tarpaulin tent drinking and playing cards.
Rain pelted the tarp. I crouched behind a lumber stack nearby, waiting for them to disperse so I could steal food from their table.
For the past two days I'd been running intermittent fevers. Now soaked by rain, my head throbbed in waves, as if a drill were boring through my skull.
Two men were playing drinking games, their voices slurred and loud—close to passing out.
Someone was bragging and shooting the breeze. Through the din of voices, I thought I caught fragments of Mandarin.
Then laughter drowned it out.
I waited until late into the night, when the workers finally had their fill and stumbled out of the tent, arms around each other's shoulders, stepping across sodden wood shavings and retreating to their distant barracks.
The hurricane lamps in this area went dark. Only the rain still tapped through the branches overhead, dripping onto my head. Dozens of meters away, a few solar emergency lights still glimmered outside the workers' quarters. By that faint glow, I watched my surroundings carefully.
My hair and clothes were thoroughly soaked.
I waited another half hour or so, then unstiffened my numb legs, hunched over, and slipped silently into the tent. In the dim light, I surveyed the chaotic table.
The smell of baijiu mixed with beer hit my nostrils.
Carefully navigating around the bottles, I gathered whatever food remained and stuffed it into my pack.
There wasn't much left on the table—these workers weren't wealthy. The drinking snacks consisted of peanuts, fried dough, and raw shredded green mango.
Nearly scraped clean.
Not even a drop in the bucket.
I felt my way to another temporary tent nearby and sniffed—gas and cooking oil. A makeshift kitchen.
Water in the vat, salt on the stove. Several bags that should have held rice and flour—I reached inside and felt around. Empty. Nothing but a few scattered grains at the bottom.
The workers' food wasn't stored here; they probably kept it in their quarters.
Disappointed, I took a small handful of salt, quietly zipped my pack, and was about to back out when I heard footsteps not far away. I dropped low, moved a few steps, and crouched behind a half-height water vat, shrinking into the shadows.
A flashlight beam swept back and forth, coming this way.
I held my breath, not daring to make a single sound.
Actually, I felt a twinge of regret at my own rashness. Timber smuggling was a hugely profitable industry in Myanmar. Logging camps like this were often illegal, basically controlled by major warlords.
Once the rainy season ended, these camps would fill with illegally conscripted "piglets" forced into labor, even death-row prisoners extradited from other countries, risking their lives felling trees.
In the rainforest, human lives were cheaper than timber.
The blood and darkness here was no less than at Little Golden Port. Maybe there were nameless dead loggers buried right under my feet.
If I got caught here, the consequences would be dire.
I bit my fist, forcing myself to stay calm. The flashlight beam swept closer. A clang from above—someone flipping open the water vat's lid. Then the sound of a dipper scooping water.
Glug, glug, glug.
The man tossed the dipper back into the vat. Splash—water droplets hit my neck. He said something in Burmese to the person outside, apparently asking a question.
"I'm not thirsty. You drink up, hurry up." A young man's voice, in Mandarin.
I raised my gaze in the darkness.
The Mandarin I'd faintly heard earlier—no hallucination. There really were Chinese nationals here. I breathed quietly, listening to the two men converse haltingly in their respective languages.
"Miaolun, the train is leaving tomorrow morning. The few of us are supposed to load the remaining wood, but can you drive a forklift?"
The response came in Burmese—sounded like a complaint.
"No choice about it. Don't work, and the foremen will kill you."
Miaolun, the Burmese man, drank another half-dipper of cold water and burped. They started joking around. Miaolun replaced the water vat lid with another clang.
The flashlight beam moved outward. The two sets of footsteps receded.
"Your own fault for eating so much pickled mango. That stuff is salty. Middle of the night, if you need to... drink water... come yourself. I'm going... to sleep..."
After a long while, I crawled out from behind the water vat.
The train. Tomorrow morning.
My body alternated between chills and heat—probably the fever worsening from the rain, compounded by hunger. My vision kept graying out in waves.
I left the tent and skirted halfway around the log-stacked camp, and sure enough, found railway tracks on the perimeter. I followed the tracks a few hundred meters and found a train parked in the curtain of rain.
6.
In the breath of the forest, it sat like a silent steel behemoth, dormant and waiting.