Yellow Wind

In spring the ice goes off the canal, and the drowned come up. On the twenty-second of March the wind brings the Yellow River into Dongying as dust. It films the windows. It silts the rice. It settles on the heads at the gate. Eleven people are still on the campus where the outbreak started, saying the morning out loud at seven, because that is how a number stays true. They have stopped waiting to be rescued. The quilts are back on the bunks. A garden has gone up on the roof. A generator that froze in February has been argued back to life. There is a class at eight, and a watch after dark, and a steel gate with water on two sides. Then the padlock knocks. The dead who went into the canal in October lay on the bottom all winter. The water has warmed. They are soft, and swollen, and they lean on the gate because the chain is the loudest thing in the street. Every knock brings another one. Across the canal, a fire is still burning in the reeds. Somebody over there has been listening to the same rule the campus learned in October: the dead follow sound. He is learning how to use it. Yellow Wind is Book Two of The Delta Dead, a grounded outbreak series set on the oilfield coast of China. It is about the first spring after a collapse, about a count that has held since February, and about a river six kilometers east that none of them have been to.