Chapter_58_Wounded_First

The muster came at dawn. The sky wasn't light yet; the section leads stood in two rows while the roll went down, name by name. At North Wall, Old Dizi answered hoarse — he'd walked the sink at the wall's foot with his men past midnight. At the workshop, Xiao Mao was absent; Big Liu answered for him: recording self-check times at the sinkhole, couldn't leave it. At the med station, Wen Heng answered. When the roll closed, Chen Jin said one thing: the war is coming back. Nobody knew when, nobody knew from where. Full readiness, starting today.

Nobody asked anything. They scattered fast, all of them with a ledger of their own to open.

Zhou Zhengting stayed behind and spread his four books on the table: army grain, work grain, ration grain, reserve — four books, four seals, two locks and two signatures on each. He pulled the cap off his brush. "Rations go to wartime shares. Three days' grain, issued starting today — to households, carried on their own backs. The scattered ward stores come in to the central granary. Also today."

"Why pull them in?" Big Liu asked.

"Scattered stores mean scattered guards," Zhou Zhengting said. "On the day it starts, there won't be enough to go around. Grain sits in the city's heart. Half a wall can fall; the grain stays."

The grain accounts ran from noon to dark. One ward store opened, counted, and emptied at a time — sacks counted, loaded, carted, received at the central granary, locked with two locks. One key on Zhou Zhengting; the other in the committee cabinet, and that one took two signatures to draw.

The carts ran by daylight, two trips, back before dark — the lamps stayed yielded, and a grain convoy doesn't move at night. Two porters took a sack between them, walking even under the weight; nobody ran, nobody dawdled. When the last store came in, the night was deep. In the unlit counting room Zhou Zhengting checked the totals by the last of the window light, signed twice on the final page, and squared the four books. "Grain is the heaviest thing in this city. From now on, no single hand touches it alone."

Ammunition was its own account. The reloader went to two shifts, day and night without a stop, output driven past three hundred a day. Day shift handed over to night shift more than a machine — the warmth of the dies, the count of the powder jars, the ruined shells boxed apart, every box with its slip. The night shift worked by a lamp burnt down to a seed of fire, and their hands didn't slow.

Big Liu opened the armory: rifles to the racks, rounds to the boxes, gun by gun counted, box by box slipped. "One rifle short is the wall's business." He said it without looking up, the count never pausing under his hands. Chen Jin stood in the doorway a while. There wasn't one thing in that room that didn't belong there, and every rifle sat butt-out on its rack — Big Liu's rule. Butt out: lift and go.

On the second morning Wen Heng came.

She didn't sit. She opened her small book on the table. "The station has to move."

Chen Jin looked up.

"The station sits on the wall line. From the wall's foot to the station door — the stretcher road — I've walked it for nearly a year." She said it evenly. "I know everything that's happened on that road. Stretchers slipped twice in the rain. The night the bugs hugged the wall, the carriers went flat in a ditch halfway. None of that's the trouble. When the war comes back, that road runs under the guns — first wave, the stretchers thread the fire line, and getting through is luck. The station moves in. To the granary. There's a cellar there — a solid mouth, two floors of planking over it."

Zhou Zhengting turned to his register. "Work tickets, I'll issue. Stretcher crews out of the labor levy — Song Laixi finds the hands. The station's goods — beds, drug cabinets, lamps — you list them, cart by cart, counted."

"The lists I'll write," Wen Heng said. "But people need a list too."

She turned a page. It was already written: two lists. One headed leaving. One headed staying.

The leaving list was the badly wounded, the ones who'd go on stretchers, and the sick old ones who couldn't wait out a siege. The staying list was the walking wounded — men who could stand, man a post, mind a gate. She read the names out to Zhou Zhengting one by one; he checked each against the register.

Halfway through, the list grew an exception: a soldier with an old knife wound in his leg, on the leaving list, came looking for her and struck his own name through. "I can sit up. Carry me for what? Leave me, I can mind a door." Wen Heng made him straighten the leg, looked at it, said nothing, and moved the name from one list to the other.

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When the reading was done the two lists lay side by side.

Zhou Zhengting picked up the leaving list, then the staying list, read both, and put them down. He looked at Wen Heng. "Your name isn't on the leaving one."

"Where the station goes, I go," Wen Heng said.

"On the day it starts, that cellar mouth — did you rank who goes in first?"

"It's ranked. First cellar, wounded. Second, children. Third, grain and medicine. I'm outside."

The room was quiet for a breath. Zhou Zhengting asked nothing more. He pushed both lists back. "Copy them fair. Two copies — one into my register, one into your cellar."

The copying fell to the school. Xiaosui carried the paper and ink back, and the old teacher picked a sheaf of his own scrap paper from the bottom of his basket — no seals, no stamps, checked sheet by sheet before the children could cut it. Two sheets with a half a chop on the corner he drew out separately and pressed back under everything, at the very bottom.

The cutting knife walked half the night; ten of the older children copied a section each, and Xiaosui stitched the pages into books. The binding ran crooked. "Crooked is fine," Xiaosui said. "Too straight looks like government work." The spoiled sheets weren't thrown away — set aside, good for tracing practice next class. By first light both lists stood four pages long, every character pressed solid.

The move went on the third day.

The stretcher crews arrived before light — sixteen men, eight stretchers, Song Laixi leading in person. The station's goods went first: drug cabinets, bed planks, lamps, cart by cart, counted. The wounded followed, the bad cases on stretchers, two porters to a man, the walking wounded trailing behind on their own feet.

The road from the old station to the granary ran through three streets. Two had been resurfaced last autumn and were easy. The third was all potholes. When the stretchers reached the mouth of that street, the lead men stopped.

The street had been paved with shutters.

Shop shutters, laid flat end to end from one end of the street to the other, the seams squared — the stretchers went over them grid by grid, steady. Song Laixi stood at the corner half a minute before he turned and asked who had ordered it. Nobody answered. He asked at shop door after shop door, and the keepers all shook their heads: nobody ordered it. They heard the street stir before light, opened up, saw the neighbors already unbarred, and unbarred their own.

A grocer at the far end had taken down his very threshold — take the threshold out and the house sits open. He said a threshold in the storeroom is still just a plank, but on the road it's one step made sure. Nobody organized it. Nobody owned it. The sixteen porters walked the shutters without a word, and every foot came down light.

Chen Jin came after the move was done. He didn't go into the new station. He walked the old road once — from the wall's foot to the old station door. Step by step, counting. Four hundred steps. At the old door he stopped, looked back at the wall, then down at the road under him.

"Should have moved the station sooner."

The words were out and the regret came with them. The station had gone up in the first days, on the wall line, for speed — a man goes down on the wall, the stretchers run, four hundred steps is nothing. That speed had saved people, more than one. But that was speed from a time when the war hadn't come back. Now it was coming, and the four hundred steps ran under the guns — the speed that saved them, the road would take it back with interest. He should have run this count the day the station posts went in. Counted it, and moved it then.

Wen Heng had followed him out. She stood at the old door and said nothing while he counted and stopped and stood with it. When he turned around, all she said was: "The cellar was swept out yesterday. Come see it."

The new station sat three blocks deeper. The cellar mouth opened under the granary's gable wall, two floors of planking over it, grain over that. Chen Jin went down and walked it once: dry inside, four lamp brackets set, a ring of empty bed frames along the wall — Wen Heng had even chalked the floor grid, bay by bay, same arrangement as the old station, not one slot different.

At the end, the two lists lay side by side on the new station's table. The leaving list copied out to a page and a half. The staying list copied out to three. Xiaosui stitched them with a steady hand, set the two books in a pair, and stepped back.

The room was quiet a few breaths. The light book and the heavy book. Nobody said why one came out light and one came out heavy, and nobody said whether it should be so. The lamp stood on the table, lighting the two of them, page under page.

Night came down and the city moved quietly. Grain in the central store, rounds in boxes, the station set, rations issued — three-day shares in cloth sacks, one to a household, the old people's and the children's share not cut short. The ration lines were short. People shouldered their sacks and walked home without much talk — grain presses the shoulder, and something else presses with it. A boy couldn't get his arms around the family sack, shifted it twice, inched along; his mother walked ahead and didn't hurry him. The night watch went round dark as always, the lamps still yielded. Somewhere far off a dog barked once and stopped.

Zhou Zhengting came late, carrying one thing, and laid it on the table.

A sheet of paper. Blank.

"The holding order goes to session tomorrow morning," he said. "You draft it."

Chen Jin looked at the paper and didn't move.

"One line, short." Zhou Zhengting said. "If you can't write it, I'll say it."

He left without leaving a brush behind — he'd known already that this draft took no brush. The paper lay empty on the table, the lamp flame standing straight and still. Chen Jin sat a long time, and set down no word. Outside, the night watch passed in the street, boots soft on the stones, dark as the rest of the city.