Victory, when it finally came to Cinder Town, did not arrive on a wave of cheering or the clatter of celebratory feasting. It slunk in on a tide of blood and exhaustion, a grim, hollow-eyed specter that demanded payment in full. There were no cheers, no songs, no raising of cups. The brutal arithmetic of survival left no room for such luxuries. Of the one hundred and sixty souls—men, women, and the older children—who had taken up arms to defend the wall, fewer than eighty now stood on their own power. The rest were strewn across the battleground like broken toys, or lay groaning in the makeshift infirmary that had once been the tavern's common room. The cost of their miracle was etched in deep, scarlet lines across the dust.
The air, thick with the coppery scent of blood, the chalky smell of disturbed dust, and the faint, sickly-sweet odor of voided bowels, was a physical weight. Cries of triumph had died in dry throats, replaced by the low, agonized moans of the wounded and the soft, hopeless weeping of those who sorted the dead. It was a victory that tasted of ashes and salt.
While a scant ten guards, their eyes wide with a mixture of awe and wariness, kept watch on the dozen or so black-haired figures who had turned the tide, the rest of the able-bodied—led by a grim John and a fiercely determined Onil—had streamed out of the shattered gate. Their mission was not celebration, but eradication. Michael understood the brutal logic of the wasteland: a wounded snake left to slither away would only return with a deadlier venom. This threat needed to be pulled out by the roots.
After entrusting the unconscious, pointy-eared archer—his mysterious savior—to the care of Lynda and Faye, Michael turned to the grimmest task of leadership: the accounting. The living were pulled from the heaps of the dead with gentle, urgent hands. A faint breath, a flicker of an eyelid, and the bearer was rushed towards the three-story tavern, now a house of frantic, unskilled mercy. Those beyond help—their bodies already cooling in the savage sun—were carried down from the wall with a solemn care that felt both pathetic and profoundly necessary. They were laid in a long, terrible line on the hard-packed earth of the main street.
Buckets of cool, impossibly precious well-water were used not for drinking, but for washing. Calloused hands, trembling with fatigue, gently sponged away the grime and blood from familiar faces, revealing the peace that death had finally granted. A clean-ish scrap of cloth, a tattered blanket, a piece of sacking—anything to shield their faces from the relentless sun—became their final honor. The simple, heartbreaking ritual did more to silence any lingering whisper of joy than any defeat could have. The soft, choked sobs of a wife cleaning her husband's face, of a child bewildered by a father's stillness, were the only psalms sung for the fallen of Cinder Town.
Amidst this quiet tragedy, Michael's feet carried him towards the group of black-haired men. Their intervention had been the pivot upon which the battle had turned. But it was more than gratitude that drew him. It was a pull in the blood, a recognition in the shape of an eye, the hue of a complexion so different from the varied shades of the wasteland. He stopped before them, and in a gesture forgotten by this new world but remembered in his bones, he brought his fists together, left over right, and bowed his head slightly in the traditional bao quansalute.
"Thank you for your righteous aid in our battle," he said, the words of Mandarin feeling both foreign and like coming home on his tongue. "Might I ask… are you men of China?"
The group stirred. The lead man, weathered and tough as old leather, with eyes that had seen too much, returned the salute with an instinctive, practiced grace. A sad, knowing smile touched his lips. "After the Great Ruin," he replied, his Mandarin fluent but carrying a rough, archaic cadence, "we are all but stray dogs fighting for scraps. There is no 'China' to speak of. But…" he paused, his voice dropping, thick with a pride that had been nurtured in barren soil, "since the day we could understand words, our fathers and their fathers before them made us swear to remember. No matter where we are, no matter how hard the life, we must not forget. The blood in our veins is the blood of the Hua-Xia. Our roots are in a land ten thousand miles away, where the Yangtze and the Yellow Rivers flow to the sea."
The words, spoken with such solemn conviction in this blasted place, struck Michael with the force of a physical blow. A shiver that had nothing to do with the heat ran down his spine. "Your ancestors… they lived here? In the old North American territories?" he asked, though something in the man's bearing already told him the answer was no.
"No," the man said, and the pride flashed brighter, fiercer. "We are the descendants of the Expeditionary Force. The ones who came to aid."
He reached into the grimy, sweat-stained tunic over his heart. His movements were reverent, careful. He withdrew a small, faded pouch of red cloth, its color bleached to a dusty pink by sun and time. With thick, scarred fingers, he undid the complex knots and unfolded the cloth, layer after layer, revealing not a jewel, but a treasure infinitely more valuable. Nestled within was a metal dog tag, its chain long gone. He placed it in Michael's palm.
The stainless steel was cool. Stamped upon it, still crisp and clear after uncountable years, was a barcode and, beneath it, lines of enduring text:
ZHANG DABIAO
BLOOD TYPE: B+
CHINA EXPEDITIONARY FORCE – NORTH AMERICAN THEATER
39TH DIVISION, 337TH REGIMENT
2ND BATTALION, 1ST COMPANY
RANK: SECOND LIEUTINANT, DEPUTY PLATOON LEADER
The words were a lightning strike, connecting the desperate, half-mad scrawl in Paul's journal to the flesh-and-blood men standing before him. This was not the tag of a migrant or a refugee. It was the tag of a soldier. One of the million. The army from the diary that had held the line in Siberia, that had been the last, fading hope of a collapsing world. Michael could see it—the long voyage across a dying ocean, the fierce battles in alien, frozen landscapes, and then the cataclysm, stranding them here, in this graveyard of a continent. An army without a country, a people without a home, clinging to an identity as their world dissolved around them.
A profound, aching respect, thicker than the battlefield dust, filled Michael's chest. He looked from the tag to the faces of the men—the descendants of Zhang Dabiao and countless others like him. They had kept the faith. Against all odds, in a world designed to make men forget, they had remembered.
Slowly, stiffly, Michael drew himself up. He was no soldier, but he knew what was owed. He brought his right hand up, fingers straight and tight, to his temple, in the best approximation of a military salute he could manage. It was for Zhang Dabiao. It was for the lost army. It was for these men who had remembered.
As one, the dozen men before him snapped to attention. Their salutes were not approximations; they were sharp, precise, and held a lifetime of drilled-in discipline. The moment hung, suspended between the past and the desperate present, a thread of unbroken tradition across an abyss of ruin.
As their hands fell, something invisible but solid settled between them. The formal distance collapsed. They were, in the most profound sense, kin.
"My brothers," Michael said, his voice rough with emotion. "You have my word. Here, in Cinder Town, I cannot promise you the world. But I can promise you safety. I can promise you full bellies and a roof that doesn't leak. You will want for nothing that is within my power to give." The promise, 'yī shí wú yōu'—clothing and food without worry—was the most fundamental contract of civilization, and here, it was a king's ransom.
The relief on their faces was instantaneous and profound. They had seen the well. They had seen the stocks. They knew he was not dealing in empty boasts.
"Now, I must attend to my wounded," Michael said. "Please, rest here. We will speak of your place among us soon."
He turned and strode towards the tavern, his mind already racing to the next crisis. The dead were gone. The living needed him. He would save every one he could. If a man was crippled? So be it. Cinder Town would feed him, shelter him, for the rest of his days. It was not charity; it was a debt, paid in the currency of loyalty and blood.
He did not see the men he had just called brothers immediately sit to rest. Instead, they rolled up their sleeves and walked towards the nearest pile of rubble, beginning to clear the debris alongside the people of Cinder Town. The silent offer of labor spoke louder than any oath of fealty.
Pushing open the heavy tavern door, Michael was met by a wall of stench that nearly drove him back—a thick, gagging cocktail of blood, antiseptic, and the underlying, meaty smell of open wounds. The main hall was a vision of makeshift horror. Tables served as operating slabs, the floor as a ward for those who could wait no longer. The female attendants and a handful of townswomen moved between them, their arms stained to the elbow, their faces pale but set in masks of concentration. They worked with a desperate, efficient speed, tying tourniquets, packing wounds with gauze, but they were a handful trying to stem a flood.
Lynda hurried over, the impressive bruise on her forehead a lurid purple. "Master," she said, her voice tight. "The medical supplies. We are running out."
"Which ones?" Michael asked, forcing calm.
"The hemostatic powder. The anti-inflammatory pills. The clean bandages… all of it. And the disinfectant spirit… we've used almost all of the strong drink from the storehouse to clean the wounds."
Michael's breath hissed through his teeth. Running out of specialized medicine was one thing. But the alcohol? He'd brought gallons of the harsh, scratch-made grain alcohol, and there were still several jugs of the foul, oily 'Atomic Vodka' in the cellar. How could it be gone?
His question was answered before he could voice it. He watched as a dog-hybrid woman, her expression one of intense focus, doused a cotton swab from a nearly-empty bottle of his precious baijiu. The wounded guard on the table before her had a deep gash along his ribs. The woman proceeded to scrub the wound, not a gentle dab, but a vigorous, determined scouring. The cotton came away black with ingrained filth, not just blood, but a lifetime of Wasteland grime packed into the crease of the wound. She did it again, and again, until the skin beneath was finally, pale and clean.
Understanding dawned, cold and grim. His 'Great Hygiene Crusade' had been superficial. It had gotten the visible dirt off. It had not reached the decades of accumulated filth ground into pores, packed under nails, buried in the seams of calloused skin. To prevent infection here, they weren't just disinfecting wounds; they were performing archaeological digs on living tissue, excavating strata of dirt to reach something resembling a clean body. They weren't using the alcohol to wash wounds. They were using it to burnthe Wasteland away.
The scale of the task, and the sheer volume of suffering it represented, settled on his shoulders with a new, crushing weight. The battle for Cinder Town's survival was over. The battle for its basic humanity had just begun, and it was being fought one agonizing, scrubbed-clean wound at a time.