Chapter 4

So Xiao Chen and the others still hadn’t come down?
Jiang Shan stood there, stunned.
She slowly looked up at the mountain in front of her—lush and green, eerily quiet. She couldn’t hear a single bird. Much less any human voice.
The feeling was suffocating.
She went back to the empty hotel lobby and sat where the front desk had been. She had no idea how long she sat there in a daze; the wind-up clock on the wall had struck again and again, sharp and clear.
The whole hotel used these old wind-up antique clocks. There was almost nothing modern—even check-in was done on an old typewriter and handwritten ledgers.
In the meantime she had tried the front-desk phone and the walkie-talkie. No signal. She couldn’t even leave and get a cab to the airport.
Her phone had no signal the whole time.
Outside, the sky was darkening again.
…
She made herself calm down and face it: she was trapped in the hotel.
Everyone was really gone.
Anyone else might have panicked.
She was scared too, but after a few steady breaths some colour had returned to her face.
When it came down to it, the worst that could happen was death.
And Jiang Shan was already dying.
So in theory, she had nothing to fear.
She looked at the lobby sinking into gloom. Not only was the food in the freezer rotting; the whole place seemed to have lost power. It had become a real, lifeless, raw cave.
She tried not to panic. She hadn’t eaten all day. With her health, she didn’t need an accident—a few days of hunger here would be enough to finish her.
There seemed to be only one path left: go up the mountain. Try to find guide Xiao Chen and the rest of the group.
If the footprints only went up and never came down, they were probably still up there.
She didn’t understand what had happened, but it didn’t look good.
She had no other choice. As the light outside faded, she got to her feet and went back to her room.
She packed her things—not much. Everything she had was in one backpack: two sets of clothes, toiletries, almost nothing else. She picked up the empty pill bottle, looked at it, thought, then put it back in the inner pocket.
She opened the bedside drawer. Inside was a backup flashlight. When she switched it on, the beam gave her a flicker of hope—every room probably had one for emergencies.
She quickly gathered three more flashlights from the other rooms. Each room had two bottles of water; she tasted it and it seemed fine.
She stuffed her bag with water and flashlights and set out.
She didn’t even have to avoid the staff anymore. She walked straight through the corridors, rounded the back of the hotel, and came to the cut in the wire fence.
“I’m not meaning to break the rules. Please forgive me.”
She stood at the foot of the mountain and let out a breath.