Golden Week

October first. National Day. The campus should have been empty. Dongying is so flat you can see the pumpjacks at the edge of the world. Six thousand students have gone home for Golden Week, or gone home early because of a flu nobody wants another lockdown for. Masks at the canteen door. A red banner on the gate. A foreign teacher running the long loop because the track makes him feel like a hamster. Aaron Doyle stayed. So did Lucy, who comes twice a week to fix her writing, and Serena, who was only supposed to feed the cat in the apartment next door. At 4:41 every phone in the building screams. Across the canal, a man in hospital pajamas walks a woman down on the path. For a second it looks like a hug. She gets back up. What follows is a survival story told at the size of one college. A steel gate. Water on two sides. Seventeen people who registered as staying over, and a guard who will not leave his post without an order. The dead are slow. They follow sound. A noise brings a moan, and the moan brings more of them, until the gate is loud because the gate is full, and full because it is loud. The harder problem is the living. Who saw the wound. Who goes out alone. Who holds the key to the food. Trust thins. Want does not. This is a novel about the first weeks of a collapse, about counting the living out loud so the number stays true, and about what people reach for when the city outside the fence will not lie back down. Golden Week is Book One of The Delta Dead, a grounded outbreak series set on the oilfield coast of China. It continues in Yellow Wind.