Chapter 4: The Secret of the Great Flood of ’98
H1: A Prophecy in the Static
The Great Flood of ‘98 was a wound on the soul of the nation. I remember it vividly. We were all glued to our televisions as the disaster unfolded, watching the muddy water swallow cities and turn provinces into inland seas. Over three thousand people were dead or missing. I’d watch the footage of soldiers, boys no older than I was, linking arms and plunging into the torrent to form human floodwalls. And I would just sit there on my sofa, safe in my living room, drowning in a cocktail of shame and relief. A profound, gnawing survivor’s guilt. I should be there with them, a voice in my head would whisper.
My grandfather would watch with me. One evening, I saw his expression grow distant and strange. He stared at the screen, his fingers unconsciously pinching together in some old, forgotten pattern, his lips trembling with words too quiet to hear.
“Are you feeling alright, Grandpa?” I asked, placing a hand on his forehead. No fever. I leaned closer and finally made out the words he was whispering to the flickering screen.
“It’s come out again.”
What’s come out again? I wondered. His rheumy eyes, usually lost in the fog of old age, were suddenly sharp as glass, fixed on the churning floodwaters. I figured he just meant the flood itself.
My grandfather was one of the toughest men I’d ever known. He was a creature of the river. In his early twenties, he’d left home to work on the Yangtze, first as a simple river hand, then helping to build the great hydroelectric dams. On his back alone, he supported my grandmother and my father’s family. In those days, just putting food on the table was a battle.
Growing up, I was mesmerized by his stories. He’d spin yarns about the Yangtze’s dark secrets—of river turtles the size of locomotives, of the clang of massive iron chains being dragged along the riverbed by things unseen, of strange, glowing lanterns that followed boats from the depths.
But my favorite story, the one that always made the hair on my arms stand up, was the one he called the Serpent’s Passage.
Here are a few options for the term 走蛟 (zǒu jiāo):
- The Serpent’s Passage: (Pros: This is the option I’ve chosen. It’s evocative, mythic, and suggests a powerful, pre-ordained event rather than just a creature moving. “Passage” has a ritualistic feel. Cons: It’s not a common term, but the context makes it clear.)
- The Dragon’s Run: (Pros: More direct and action-oriented. “Run” implies speed and power, fitting the flood context. Cons: Might sound slightly less ancient or mysterious than “Passage.”)
- The Wyrm’s Wake: (Pros: Uses “Wyrm,” a powerful, archaic term for a dragon or serpent. “Wake” perfectly describes the destructive path it leaves. Cons: “Wyrm” can feel a bit more European fantasy, but it works well.)
Whenever he told that tale, of a serpentine dragon passing through the land during a flood and crushing a bridge under its sheer weight, his face would become deadly serious. He spoke not like a man telling a story, but like a man giving eyewitness testimony.
That night, watching the news, he suddenly turned his head and looked directly at me. “It’s come out,” he said, his voice eerily calm. “And now I have to go.”
I didn’t understand the gravity of his words. I was a fool. A month later, my grandfather passed away peacefully in his sleep.
H2: A Ghost from the Past
The summer of 2000 arrived hot and humid. One evening, after dinner, I went for a walk to escape the stuffy air. When I returned, I saw a figure standing in the shadows by my front door. He was wearing a single black glove and smoking a cigarette, his head bowed. Hearing my footsteps, he looked up.
My breath caught in my chest. It was a face I hadn’t seen in a decade.
“Hu Yang?” I stammered.
His face broke into a weary, familiar grin. We had gone to the same high school, enlisted together, but fate had sent us to opposite ends of the country—me to the desolate plains of Qinghai, him to the lush hills of Hunan. I’d looked for him after I was discharged, but his family had moved without a trace.
“You son of a bitch,” I laughed, pulling him into a rough embrace. “Where the hell have you been? Are you out of the service now?”
We went inside, and I poured him tea. Up close, he looked worn down. His face was covered in scruffy stubble, and a deep, unshakable melancholy hung in his eyes. We talked for an hour, catching up on old times, the words flowing easy between us.
Eventually, the conversation drifted to the ‘98 flood. Hu Yang’s expression changed. A shadow passed over his face. He looked at me with an intensity that made me deeply uncomfortable.
“Do you know why I left the army right after the ’98 flood, Xia Zhu?” he asked. His tone was heavy with meaning, and it instantly brought to mind another person I had tried to forget: Jiang Tao.
He didn’t wait for an answer. He just began to speak.
His unit was one of the first to be deployed. The scale of the disaster, he said, was biblical. Even as a seven-year veteran, the sheer power of the water terrified him. Before their convoy had even cleared the main levee, a colossal wave crashed over the barrier and snatched the lead truck, pulling it and the fifteen soldiers inside into the torrent. None of them were ever seen again.
There was no time to mourn. When they reached their designated coordinates, they found the situation was not what they expected. This wasn’t a search and rescue mission. The riverbanks were lined with heavily armed soldiers, their rifles at the ready. This was a containment zone.
Hu Yang’s company was given a single, insane order: dam the river. Use anything. Rocks, sandbags, timber. When that ran out, they were to use their bodies.
For the first few days, with ample supplies, it was just back-breaking labor. By day five, the supplies were gone. The order came down: form a human wall. They linked arms and waded into the powerful current. Men were constantly being swept away. Sometimes, they would just vanish beneath the surface, pulled under by something unseen.
Then, a soldier started screaming about a monster in the water. The troops on the bank opened fire. The water frothed, then turned red. Moments later, the corpse of a giant catfish, fifteen feet long and bloated white, floated to the surface and drifted downstream.
From that day on, Hu Yang’s unit carried their rifles with them into the water. The river had come alive with strange, aggressive fish, all of them armed with razor-sharp teeth. They were impossibly large—the smallest were over ten feet long, the largest nearly thirty.
That’s when Hu Yang understood the terrible truth. They weren’t there to build a dam. They were the dam. And they were the bait.
News crews were kept at a distance, filming feel-good segments about heroic soldiers willing to sacrifice everything. Hu Yang said he would look at the cameras and feel a desperate urge to scream the truth. But he couldn’t. He didn’t dare.
On the ninth day, after reinforcements had arrived, the atmosphere grew tense. An urgent message came from command. Hu Yang’s entire regiment was ordered into the water, fully armed. They were joined by troops from the riverbank. More than five hundred men packed into the channel, shoulder to shoulder.
Suddenly, the roaring river went quiet. The powerful current slowed, then stopped, as if a colossal gate had been slammed shut upstream. Then came a deafening explosion from upriver. The water bucked. A black line appeared in the middle of the channel, a massive object hurtling toward them, wrapped in a sheath of churning water.
BOOM!
A tidal wave crested over a stone bridge a mile upstream. A colossal, blue-black shape erupted from the water, arcing through the air and landing directly on the bridge, crushing it into dust. The wave, now an unstoppable wall of water, roared toward the human dam.
The guards on the bank opened fire on the shape in the water, their bullets kicking up geysers around it. Hu Yang felt his body being lifted, tossed about like a rag doll. He saw his comrades thrown high into the air or smashed against the rocks. And through it all, the shape in the water kept coming, moving with the speed of a freight train, letting out a low, thrumming roar that vibrated through his bones.
His rifle was torn from his hands. The wave hit him, plunging him into the chaos below. Underwater, he saw two glowing red orbs, like giant lanterns, rushing toward him. It was the creature’s eyes. As the blue-black shadow, thick as a car, shot past him, he acted on pure, insane impulse. He reached out and grabbed it.
The cold was absolute, a soul-deep chill that felt like it was freezing his marrow. It was followed by a searing pain in his palm. He cried out, his hand recoiling, and watched the shape vanish into the downstream murk.
I sat there, stunned into silence, the story echoing my grandfather’s darkest tales.
“I need your help, Xia Zhu,” Hu Yang said, his voice pulling me back to the present. He leaned back on the sofa, his tired eyes pleading with me. “I know this sounds insane. But it happened. I saw it.”
He took a deep breath. “After I was discharged, I spent two years looking. Trying to find any trace of that creature. I think… I think I’m close to a lead.” He gave a bitter, humorless smile and held up his gloved hand. “I have my reasons for looking.”
Slowly, deliberately, he pulled off the black glove.
I gasped, nearly falling off the sofa.
His hand was not the hand of a man. From the wrist down, it was covered in a dense, overlapping pattern of small, iridescent scales, like those of a fish or a reptile. A wave of goosebumps washed over me.
Seeing the horror on my face, he quietly put the glove back on. “Everyone has that reaction,” he said, the corner of his mouth twitching. “I’m used to it.”
“What… what happened to you?” I stammered.
“The thing I grabbed,” he said, “it cut my palm. I thought it was just a scratch, but the wound never healed. After a while, it started to itch. Then the scales started growing out from the scar. I’d pull them off, but they’d just grow back.”
I reached out, my morbid curiosity winning over my fear, and touched his gloved hand. I could feel the hard, uneven texture of the scales beneath the fabric.
“But what can I do?” I asked, bewildered. “I’m not a doctor.”
Hu Yang leaned in close, his gaze intense. He sniffed the air around me.
“Because,” he said, his voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper, “you have a smell on you. It’s faint, but it’s there. It’s a smell I’ve come to know very well.”
He locked his eyes on mine. “You smell like one of them.”