Evening Stars Chapter 32 (Part 3)
Translated by Q the Panda (ko-fi)
Chapter 32.3
The fourth day.
Fang Shiyou, too, had developed a habit of checking his phone as soon as he opened his eyes. It was now the fourth day without power or signal, and his battery icon was a thin sliver of red.
“Have they dug the people out yet?” Fang Shiyou got up from the makeshift camp bed, quickly brushed his teeth and washed his face, then pulled on a mask. “Yesterday you said there were still two inside?”
Two firefighters, panting heavily, answered, “It's hard digging. The machinery can't get up here. They managed to pull one out before dawn.”
Fang Shiyou froze. “Then…… why didn't you call us?”
“He was already gone when we got him out.” The firefighter sighed and shook his head, wiping the side of his face with a dirty glove. “Doctor, you mentioned yesterday that the camp needs a power source. We should be able to haul up a battery this afternoon. One of our guys will bring it over on a motorcycle.”
Fang Shiyou nodded. “Alright. Tell them to be careful. Their safety comes first.”
“Yeah.” The firefighter nodded. “Okay, we'll keep digging. We'll call you once we find someone.”
None of the medical team had slept much in the past three days. Not only Fang Shiyou, but all the medical staff from the small hospital and surrounding clinics had hardly closed their eyes. The landslide was far worse than anyone had expected, and a secondary collapse had even occurred during the rescue.
A boulder the size of a car had rolled down beside their camp, grazing the fabric of the tents. In that instant, faced with the raw power of nature, most people were stunned silent, too shocked even to gasp.
All emergency power was connected to the ambulance equipment. To prevent the ambulance batteries from dying and failing to start later, the firefighters had hauled up several spare power units from the foot of the mountain. Under these conditions, charging a phone was out of the question. Every bit of electricity went to life-support machines.
Fang Shiyou looked up at the sky. The clouds were dark and heavy.
Then a nurse shouted from the camp, “Dr. Fang!”
He immediately turned and ran over. “What's wrong?”
“Ventricular fibrillation!” the nurse yelled. “Dr. Gao's doing compressions!”
Fang Shiyou sprinted toward the camp.
The so-called camp was a few military tents set up jointly by the firefighters and border guards after the landslide. The site was treacherously located on a mountain slope. Fire trucks could barely get there, and even the ambulances had to be pushed up by hand.
When Fang Shiyou arrived, Dr. Gao was performing chest compressions. Fang Shiyou looked at the monitor displaying the V-Fib waveform. Dr. Gao shook his head helplessly. “The defibrillator's out of power.”
“The backup battery won't be here until afternoon,” Fang Shiyou said through clenched teeth. “We'll take turns pressing until the power's brought up.”
“Alright,” Dr. Gao replied.
Due to the unfavorable geography and the scarcity of resources like electricity, every survivor pulled from the site by firefighters and border guards had to receive treatment from the medical team first before being carried down the mountain once their vital signs stabilized. The only way to transport them was the old-fashioned way: two border guards carrying a stretcher by hand.
It was destined to be a long, drawn-out rescue, one that grew more hopeless by the hour. The severely injured who couldn't withstand movement lay waiting, while border soldiers below struggled to carve a road to allow vehicle access, and the firefighters kept digging with the most basic excavation tools.
The nurses and doctors took turns doing compressions. When the monitor's battery finally died, no one knew, and no one asked, how much longer they should keep going, or whether it still made any difference.
After thirty minutes of chest compressions, Fang Shiyou let the emergency nurse take over and went to the rock pile to clean and stitch the wounds of another newly rescued survivor. He forced his hands not to shake. After half an hour of CPR, his fingers picked up the suture thread.
At last, the firefighters hauled the power supply up the mountain with ropes.
It was 3:35 in the afternoon. Xu Nanheng took a sip of coffee from his thermos, while Dasang Choedon stood nervously beside the podium.
“One degree is πR² divided by 360. Then for n degrees, it's nπR² divided by 360. Now, point out the parts that are the same.”
Dasang Choedon said, “The…… numerator. They both have nπR².”
Xu Nanheng: “So it can be simplified to nπR over 2, right?”
Dasang Choedon hesitated. “……Yes.”
“Why?” Xu Nanheng looked at her calmly. “Tell me why it can be simplified. Show me.”
“……”
Landslide rescue camp.
“Give me a sturdier pair of forceps,” Fang Shiyou said sharply. “This one's too soft. I can't grip anything with it!”
He rarely ever spoke that sharply.
After the power supply was pulled up, another severely bleeding survivor was dug out. Performing vascular sutures in these conditions was a nightmare. The magnifying goggles on Fang Shiyou's head were covered with dust more than once, and whenever that happened, he couldn't move his hands and had to call a nurse to wipe them with a cotton swab.
The wind on the mountain was fierce, slowing the suturing progress to less than half its usual speed. Moreover, with insufficient anesthesia, someone had to hold the patient down. The tent itself felt like a drum skin, and the mountain wind continuously hammered it with loud thumping sounds. This was what it meant to be a field doctor.
The fifth day.
Diki's uncle and Zhou Yang's father came to the school kitchen, bringing potatoes and flour. Parents often donated food to the school. After they dropped off the supplies, they ran into Xu Nanheng outside.
The two greeted him warmly.
But Xu Nanheng was distracted. It took until the second greeting for him to react. “Ah, sorry, I…… zoned out for a moment.”
They chatted casually after that. Lately, everyone was talking about the village forty kilometers away where the landslide had happened. Diki's uncle said their family recited sutras daily, hoping for everyone's safety. Zhou Yang's father added that the village over there was even smaller than theirs, with roads so bad that people usually traveled by ox cart.
Then Zhou Yang's father said, “My younger brother and his comrade went there yesterday to deliver a few batteries. They said another landslide happened last night. Lots of people died.”
The thermos cup slipped from Xu Nanheng's hands and hit the ground with a loud clang.
“Teacher?”
“Teacher, are you feeling unwell?”
The sixth day. It was the weekend.
Xu Nanheng couldn't sit still anymore.
He went to the small hospital yard and started up the G-Wagon, pinning his hopes on this three-million-yuan off-road king to truly conquer the mountains and cross the ridges for him.
He couldn't stand that his last conversation with Fang Shiyou had ended with that ambiguous ‘Wait until I get back.’ Every day, countless people in this world drown in the thought, ‘If only I had……’ Xu Nanheng hated hypotheticals. He also hated probabilities.
It was 9:45 AM. The skies over the Southern Tibet were still gray.
The clouds hung heavy, full of oppressive force and menace. Teacher Xu relied on the powerful performance of his Mercedes-Benz G-Wagon SUV. This large, ferocious off-road beast, with its full-time four-wheel drive and open center differential, drove westward on the kind of treacherous terrain roads of the Southern Tibet where only livestock transport was normally possible.
Zhou Yang's father had told him that to to find the village, he had to set the navigation to a certain viewing platform, then look for a landmark sign halfway there and turn onto a dirt road leading up the mountain.
Xu Nanheng didn't know if he could actually find the place, but if he didn't at least try, he knew he'd regret it. At the same time, he was genuinely grateful he had brought the hardcore off-roader.
Two and a half hours later, he knew he was in the right place. From halfway up the mountain, he saw the border patrol's off-road vehicles and fire trucks. The moment they spotted a civilian vehicle approaching, the border guards stepped forward to stop him.
“Are you a tourist?” The border guard glanced at his license plate. “Don't go any farther. There's been a landslide up ahead. Turn around and head back.”
“No!” Xu Nanheng jumped out of the car. “I'm a volunteer teacher. Ah, I have my border pass here. My…… my friend is up there. Can I go see him?”
The guard looked him over. “It's no use. Everyone who could be carried down has already been carried down.”
The man clearly thought Xu Nanheng's friend was a local villager. He hurriedly explain, “No, my friend's a Tibet aid doctor. I…… I haven't been able to reach him for six days.”
“Oh.” The guard nodded, studying him again. “Which doctor? What's his name? Where's he from?”
Xu Nanheng told him everything he knew.
The situation up there had mostly stabilized. Several emergency power units had been sent up, and the ambulance equipment was running again. As they talked, two soldiers came down carrying a stretcher, loading the patient into an off-road vehicle. The terrain was brutal, and the border patrol's SUVs, equipped with mud tires, could only inch down at a slow speed of 20 km/h.
The guard questioning Xu Nanheng asked the soldiers about the situation above. They said all the people who could be dug out had been rescued. Four or five were still trapped and couldn't be moved, along with one pregnant woman.
Xu Nanheng tried to plead again. He promised he wouldn't get in the way, that he just wanted to take a look. The guard eventually relented and told him to follow the soldiers up.
It took forty exhausting minutes of hiking through the mountains. By the end, Xu Nanheng's legs were trembling. This wasn't a normal trail. In some areas he had to grab branches to haul himself upward. He couldn't even imagine how the soldiers had managed to carry stretchers down this path.
After forty minutes, Xu Nanheng finally saw the military tents behind the pile of rubble. He spotted a few people in white coats and masks and heard the chaos of voices. After the long climb, his ears were ringing and his vision was starting to blur.
“Hey, hey.” The soldier who had brought him up noticed his dazed look. “You alright?”
“I'm fine.” Xu Nanheng came back to his senses. “Thank you. Don't worry about me.”
“Find your friend and then head back down,” the soldier said. “The weather's turning. We're wrapping up the rescue soon too.”
“Alright.”
Stumbling over the rubble, Xu Nanheng made his way toward the tents. There were more and more people in white coats in his line of sight. His nerves tightened. The white coats moving all around almost made him snow-blind.
Because he was staring at each one, trying to recognize faces.
There were three large tents in total. He reached the last one and still hadn't seen Fang Shiyou. A nurse was helping a patient with a broken leg and told him to move aside. He stepped away mechanically, just as a doctor brushed past him, pulling on latex gloves while walking.
Xu Nanheng passed through the third tent and stepped outside. A few firefighters were sitting on rocks, resting. He continued walking forward, following a path that curved around. Although he knew there was probably nothing beyond that bend, his feet still carried him forward.
From the other side of the turn came a figure, tall, well-built, in a white coat, carrying a bucket of spring water.
The moment their eyes met, the man's expression turned from surprise to disbelief.
The next second, Fang Shiyou dropped the bucket and quickly walked toward him. Xu Nanheng’s legs, which had been too tired to move just moments before, firmly stepped forward as well.
When they reached each other, neither said a word. Both lifted their arms and pulled the other into a tight embrace.
As they held each other, they kissed.
In silence, with all the strength and certainty they had left, they kissed each other.