Volume One, Chapter Fifty: The Nest of Poison

In the dilapidated little room of the "Juran Guesthouse," Flying Squirrel found the only staff member—also the landlady. After hearing his description of the woman, the swarthy, overweight landlady looked at him with distaste. "You're a junkie too, aren't you? No good things come from your kind mixing together!"

Flying Squirrel was well aware that his frail appearance often misled people. He chuckled, not bothering to explain, though he was surprised by the landlady's use of the word "too." In this world, only money could shift the scales of right and wrong. He generously produced three hundred yuan.

The landlady, accepting what amounted to the cost of fifteen rooms for a night's stay, used a ballpoint pen to mark the location of a farm on a scrap of old newspaper.

Flying Squirrel had studied the map of the area and recognized this farm.

She explained that east of the farm was a mountain, at the foot of which there was a quarry. All the buildings here were two-story structures; he needed to find Building Seven, easily identified by the large number seven painted on its side. The room he sought was on the second floor, at the right end of the left-hand stairwell.

Finally, the landlady stuffed the money into her bra with her plump hands, as if afraid someone might snatch it away at any moment. "That place is crawling with junkies! Once you see her, you'll understand why I threw her out!"

She suddenly remembered that the scrawny man before her was a junkie too—one with money—and added, "If you’re looking to buy heroin, you’ve come to the right person. She has plenty."

Though the route was flat and less than twenty kilometers, Flying Squirrel still spent over an hour bumping along before reaching the abandoned farm. The dirt road was rutted and uneven, but worse were the sharp gray stones littering the way, dropped from quarry trucks.

He worried that the tires on his Santana wouldn't survive, but his years of driving on bad roads saw him through safely.

He could tell, even before arriving, that this was the place.

In the distance, the lush green mountain rose, but a large swath of its face was exposed as a grayish-white cliff—blasted open by quarrying, like a beautiful body marred by an ugly, gaping wound. The shattered mountainside resembled the head of a colossal beast, the white blasted section its gaping maw, the giant squared stones its fangs. Flying Squirrel, meanwhile, wound his way up the rugged mountain road, staggering toward the monster.

They called it a farm, though there wasn't even a fence, nor any trace of past cultivation. The vast expanse of red earth stretched to the scarred hills, covering perhaps ten thousand acres. Once-fertile soil now lay choked with weeds, mixed with white gravel, black coal lumps, and yellow cinders.

Rows of gray concrete buildings stood abruptly amid the wild grass, with thin columns of smoke rising from the chimneys—evidence of the only remaining life.

Once, those two-story buildings were known as "barracks," housing passionate young intellectuals who believed they could "make a difference in the vast world." There were also those less fortunate by birth, hoping to reinvent themselves here. Now, the barracks were all but deserted; their former inhabitants had long set out on divergent paths of fate. What remained resembled standard-issue prisons, or perhaps oversized coffins.

Confronted with these drab "coffins," Flying Squirrel took a deep breath. He used to act with five comrades against one or two targets at a time. Now, he had to face countless foes alone.

If he lost, he would become a nameless corpse, not even warranting a coffin lid.

If he won, he would be a true warrior.

It was time for him to choose between life and death.

The farm, a relic from the Cultural Revolution era, was laid bare before him, but Flying Squirrel could see no sign anything had ever been cultivated here. Cow sheds, cattle pens, and fallen pigsties lay scattered across the wasteland, but not a single cow or pig was in sight.

Coming from the cramped, chaotic "concrete forests" of the city, Flying Squirrel suddenly felt a deep affection for farmland. The peace and vastness here seemed to sing a poetic indifference to the world.

This was the land he had always longed for—a place to grow his own vegetables and raise livestock. What puzzled and angered him was how the insidious tentacles of drugs had reached even to this idyllic, secluded place.

"The earth is beautiful and enchanting, yet mankind is so ugly," he thought, a wave of sorrow washing over him.

Flying Squirrel parked at the entrance to the farm and hopped across the rutted fields. As he neared the abandoned housing block, the stench hit him so hard he felt dizzy. Human waste, animal dung, rotting food, and even the sour tang of vomit laced with cheap liquor—the reek came from all of them.

He heard a strange sound, like a gathering of animals.

Flies.

Billions of flies swarmed above the buildings, their wings beating the air with a droning hum. Flying Squirrel was reminded of the Russian Mi-8 military helicopter he once piloted in training.

Flies have peculiar tastes. They either crave the sweetest things—he had seen them swarming bee farms, raiding honeycombs, and dying en masse on sticky, sugar-coated flypaper—or the foulest. The latrine was their gourmet restaurant, their ideal place to mate and lay eggs. The females would deposit clusters of eggs on floating feces; within hours, these became wriggling maggots, then pupae, and within about ten days, fully grown flies. In the right conditions, a pair of houseflies could spawn two hundred billion descendants in a single summer.

Flying Squirrel wondered if the stench carried the scent of human decay.

He felt nauseous, pulled his loose suit collar over his head to cover as much of his face as possible, leaving only his eyes exposed—though his hands could not escape the flies, nor could his clothes shield him from the incessant drone of their wings.

The flies blotted out the blue sky. Flying Squirrel advanced slowly, as if entering a gray, apocalyptic city.

In the distance, a few dark figures stumbled between the ruined buildings, barefoot and unsteady, flitting through the sunlight like ghosts.

He recognized them as junkies.

He spotted Building Seven—the number painted in white lime on its gray brick wall, so large it spanned an entire story. He entered the first stairwell. By now, the stench seemed less overwhelming; his nose had grown numb to it.

Stepping from the blazing sunlight into the dark corridor, his eyes struggled to adjust. He stood cautiously where the light was dim. In the shadows beneath the stairs, two half-naked, emaciated bodies sat motionless. Seasoned as he was, Flying Squirrel’s heart skipped a beat.

Though he had worked for years in what was effectively a den of drugs, his job had never involved narcotics enforcement. He'd dealt with traffickers and manufacturers, but these people never used the stuff themselves.

In the villages along the border, there were addicts, but few dared indulge in broad daylight. Even in bars where users gathered, most only came after taking their fix.

Here, in a place overrun by drugs, users were still as reviled as rats, scorned by family and neighbors alike.

The two before him, it seemed, were dead junkies—cause of death unknown. No one would bother to remove their bodies; their ends were no different than poisoned rats.

Yet this was the first time Flying Squirrel had come face to face with addicts up close. Their skin was covered in scratches; tattooed forearms bore chunks of bloody, torn flesh.

He walked up to the bodies, tugging at his suit. He wasn’t sure whether to inspect the dead. He leaned in, closer to their faces—no breath. Closer still, and all at once, both pairs of eyelids fluttered open, startling him into a step back.

The two junkies had forgotten how many days it had been since they last ate; even breathing or opening their eyes took effort. Yet anyone appearing here in a suit was almost certainly a dealer, and their desperate hunger for heroin roused them.

Now, Flying Squirrel could see: two pairs of eyes, sunken deep, their pupils unfocused and sluggish, like the eyes of dead fish. Yet in that moment, a wild, yearning light shone through. If he had offered them a small packet of powder, they would have traded their lives in an instant.

He did in fact have the stuff—before Luo Lin had asked if he wanted any "powder," he’d already lifted two packets from the stash kept with the guns.

Flying Squirrel leaned in again, inhaling their foul breath as if sniffing flowers. Then he took a drag from his cigarette and exhaled the smoke in their faces.

The junkies stared at him in terror, not knowing that Flying Squirrel himself was afraid—afraid as one is of rats or cockroaches. He had his own way of conquering fear: the more he dreaded something, the closer he forced himself to it, until the fear retreated.

His nose was almost touching theirs. The grime on their faces was cracked like parched earth, their matted hair caked to their scabbed scalps, their bloodshot eyes rolling weakly in swollen, blackened sockets.

Their nearly naked bodies were riddled with injection marks, many of which had festered into oozing sores, leaking thin yellow pus. They breathed out putrid air and made animalistic grunts.

Frightened by his strange behavior, the junkies struggled to sit up, backing against the wall and inching up the stairs. Close to death, their minds were as feeble as their bodies, unable to withstand even a scare.

Flying Squirrel pulled from his pocket a packet of heroin, about the size of a matchbox, and waved it in the air. With a call like beckoning animals, he shouted "Hey!" The junkies flinched and looked back, eyes widening at the sight of something more precious than their lives—a full ten grams of heroin. Both reached out as if to snatch at it with the last of their strength.

He asked, "You came looking for the dealer, but had no money, so they wouldn’t sell to you?"

Both nodded, if their heads could still be called that.

Flying Squirrel nodded as well, pointing to where they had been sitting, signaling them to return.

Their eyes stayed fixed on the little packet, breathing ragged; they sat down again. Flying Squirrel thought of dying rats.

He asked again, "I’ll give you this packet, no charge. Tell me, is the dealer upstairs a woman? How many people live there?"

He saw two fingers held up.