Hey Everyone,
Chapter one posted below. Enjoy!!
© Paul Goodfellow and After the Scifi Apocalypse, 2015. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from the author is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Paul Goodfellow and After the Scifi Apocalypse with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
Chapter 1: In the Land of the Living
First Provincial Hospital
Central District
Xi’an, North Chinese People’s Directorate
April 1, 2014
We entered the famous northern city of Xi’an, the historical home of half a dozen Chinese dynasties and kingdoms, expecting a bleak and depressing place befitting its recent title: Capital of the Xi’an Directorate. In the ten years since the death of Director Su Hongshan, Xi’an and the Northern Directorate have emerged from their recent history into what appears to be a better future. The streets are filled with animal-drawn carts, horses, pedestrians, and even the occasional car and tractor, though they are usually steam-powered. The city has a cobbled-together atmosphere befitting its multi-ethnic population. Since 2004 Xi’an has been a magnet for immigrants leaving the Central Chinese ruins, and as the largest city north of Guangdong Province it has attracted visitors and immigrants from as far afield as Kashgar and Urumqi.
At the same time, it also looks worn out. The city has been constantly inhabited for over three millennia. The farmland in the region is slowly dying under the weight of demand from tens of thousands of new residents. The Xi’an Drum Tower and the old imperial structures have been requisitioned and made into government offices, meaning that the old tourist attractions are now off-limits to all but official visitors. The old and new freely mingle in this city which has seen the comings and goings of conquerors and pacifists, of armies of soldiers and armies of citizens, of eras of war and eras of peace. In no other surviving city in China is the country’s history preserved in so complete a fashion as in the worn out, dilapidated, yet lively city of Xi’an.
2014 was the first year since 1984 that one could travel by train from Hong Kong inland to Shanxi Province and beyond to the still connected western provinces of Qinghai, Gansu, Xinjiang, and northern Tibet. The Northern Directorate, along with the Republic of China-Taiwan/Fujian and the Confederation of the Pearl River, came together to jointly fund and construct the new rail line in hopes that easing travel burdens between South and North China would help foster ties between the survivor states. It was hoped that by linking all three together by rail, future generations would be encouraged to come together in a spirit of collaboration to help rebuild what was shattered thirty years ago.
Although the real reason, as most academics would argue it, was pure economics: Xi’an had no trade outlets to the outside world. While the RoC-F/T and the cities of the Pearl River have maintained maritime trade with the Vietnamese Federation, the northern and southern Thai states, and the long-standing military junta in Burma, the Northern Directorate and its ally, the Datong Collective, have had no trade connections with any region other than Western China since 1984. With the new rail ties, it is hoped that the factories of the Northern Directorate can find outlets in the markets of Guangdong, Taiwan, and beyond.
We came to Xi’an to interview some of the survivors of the 1984 war and the decades of madness under Director Su, specifically one man whose name we cannot give. His latest, and seemingly last, place of residence was the oncological ward of the First Provincial Hospital. Like most survivors of 1984, he was stricken with some form of highly aggressive cancer that was slowly eating him from the inside out. He had the misfortune of developing an aggressive, fast spreading form of leukemia that would leave him dead within a few months.
He had been a former PLA junior officer at the outbreak of the war stationed outside Hohhot, Inner Mongolia. He survived the four days of conventional combat in the Sino-Soviet War, the February 23rd nuclear exchange, and the months of combat that followed. In that regard, our interviewee was one of the ‘lucky’ ones who made it through a year where the PLA’s casualty percentage is high enough that one shudders to even attempt to tabulate it. He was one of the last surviving commissioned PLA officers that managed to make it out of Inner Mongolia in 1984 with a detachment under his command. And in the years that followed, he became the leader of a now infamous militia brigade that enforced security along one of the surviving rail lines in western Gansu Province under the orders of Director Su. His tactics and use of military force to protect the line have earned him the title, ‘Railway Butcher of Gansu.’
On our way to interview him at the First Provincial Hospital, we were witness to one of the new youth brigades that have formed in the North Chinese People’s Directorate. A group of high school students, no older than 18, marched by us waving red and yellow banners singing a re-written version of an old Communist song, “Without the Communist Party, there is no New China.” The lyrics were unimportant, as it has likely been rewritten a dozen times in the two years since we visited, but what was remarkable was that the old spirit was coming back. The youngest generation was starting to find its confidence again. Our parents and grandparents that survived the war, even in Hong Kong and Taiwan, were cowed into fear by the bombs, famine, pestilence, and death. Although Xi’an was still recovering, it seemed that the new generation of farmers and workers in Shaanxi province was more confident than those that birthed them.
When we entered the hospital room, our interviewee appeared to be asleep. His skin had taken on an ashen hue. His eyes had sunken into what looked like deep pits where his eye sockets once resided. For all intents and purposes, he appeared to be in the last days of his life. Unfortunately for him, like most survivors who were exposed to the extremely dirty weapons that the Chinese government had available to them in 1984, his cancer was terminal, aggressive, and unresponsive to treatment. He awoke slowly, a dry cough announcing his return from the unconscious mind. He gave us a weak smile and drank a small glass of tepid water that was resting on his bedside table. Eventually we got to the questions. When we asked him what name to use in the text, he said to call him,
“Corporal Lei Feng, because I’m still an old communist at heart!” He exclaimed. A series of dry coughs followed as he recovered from the exuberant outburst.
When we asked him what it was that struck him most about the lead up to the crisis, it was the routineness of the whole thing.
“It all felt like old ground,” said ‘Corporal Lei.’
“Every other time that the Yanks and the Soviets had crises flare up, it was always the same. After a few weeks, the crisis would abate and go back to normal.”
“After a few weeks, it all seemed to change. The tensions never really lessened after they started up in October. It started to feel less like routine and more like the real thing. Around the first week of November, I was redeployed from my operating base in Nanjing to a post in Inner Mongolia to babysit a rail switch outside Baotou. There was maybe a battalion of us that got shipped north. I complained at the time about getting sent to a backwater post where I would never get considered for promotion or advancement. In retrospect, I know that my redeployment saved mine and my comrade’s lives. If I had not been redeployed, I very well would have been vaporized along with the rest of Nanjing,” he said, emphasizing the point with another string of ragged coughs.
“I heard long after the fact, just after I got back from Gansu Province, that in early November 1983 Deng and his subordinates held some high level planning session and decided then to go into Siberia if the Soviets ended up in a war in Central Europe. There was some grandiose idea to retake Vladivostok and the lands lost under the terms of the Ussuri River Treaty. The other offensives that we all heard about, the ones to drive the Red Army out of Afghanistan and the southward push towards the Soviet military base at Haiphong, they were all secondary. The push into Siberia and the holding action at the Mongolian border were always supposed to be the main theaters of war,” said ‘Corporal Lei.’
“I had heard some rumors like that in late 1983 that we were going to war, but I discounted them as anti-party propaganda spread by capitalist-roaders who wanted to undermine Comrade Deng and his reforms. It wasn’t until very late December that they had some weight to them. That was when most of the border troops began receiving large amounts of ammunition from the storage depots, and that was when my detachment was reinforced to divisional strength. Fresh troops and reservists from the central provinces poured into Inner Mongolia. A buddy of mine who was stationed in the northeast wrote me a lengthy letter in early January. He talked about dozens of divisions getting shipped into Heilongjiang Province near where he was stationed. I don’t know how that letter got past the military censors. By then, it was written on the walls: We were going to war with our Socialist big brothers, the Soviet Union, and the Warsaw Pact,” he said with a pained grimace. He shook his head and looked down at his knobby, weathered hands.
“I always believed that we would find compromise with the Russians. They were fellow socialists, our older red brothers. Sure they had gone down the path of revisionism, but they could be brought back into the fold if they had their own Deng Xiaoping to show them the way. I never believed it would come to war,” he said.
‘Corporal Lei’ hesitated for a moment and lifted his head to stare out the window which looked out onto the street. It was filled with foot and bicycle traffic. The air had a brown haze from the ubiquitous coal fireplaces and ovens, and dust kicked up from the farmlands of Shaanxi, Shanxi, and Inner Mongolia. He let out a string of pained coughs, his wasted frame shook as he coughed hard twice and ceased; blood had spattered on his hands in a shower of small drops. He roughly wiped them on the hospital white sheets.
“I honestly feel sorry for those of you who have had to grow up in this post-atomic world. You never got to see the world before the bombs fell. There was such promise. Not a week has gone by since then that I have not at some point broken down and wept for what I lost that day, and what we all lost. I lost my fiancée, my parents, my hometown. I lost everything.”
“I know it doesn’t mean much coming from me. What I have made of my life since that evening is not worthy of sympathy. The blood on my hands is too much to wash off. Too many people have died on my orders, or by my actions. But I was a decent man before it all fell apart. I was a good man,” he said and trailed off again. He seemed to be convincing himself of the truth of that statement as much as he wanted to convince us of that.
In all honesty, I did feel some sympathy for him. Both of us who were there that day to interview the illustrious ‘Corporal’ understood in some small way that he was as much a victim of circumstances as anyone. No one had made it out of the 1984 war unscarred, or unchanged. My father had been forced in circumstances beyond his control to carry out actions that deeply changed him. All of us had family and friends who lived through those chaotic and bloody years who were forced to make painful choices between killing and dying.
“I know that how we act in crisis says a lot about who we are as people. How I responded was perhaps a reflection of how our country responded to the war. We turned on each other, one by one, and in the ashes of our cities and our farms we ate each other alive. The ruins of the country and of the cities that were destroyed by our infighting are a testament to the depths to which we sank after our civilization died around us.”
“I hope that the history books will not even remember my name. It is better if my bones end up in some family graveyard, long forgotten, and left untended. I was never a religious man, and my grandmother always chastised my lack of reverence for the family ancestors. I hope that, if she was right and I have to come back again to atone for my actions in this life that I will be allowed to remember enough to not make the same mistakes again. I cannot erase what I did, but I do genuinely hope that in the next life, all of us can somehow or another make up for what we did to one another in those months and years after the end of the world.”