Every time that legendary woman went to the supermarket to collect her rations in her past life, she saw tiny, thread-like bugs spring from the woman's dense, infested scalp. Some crawled purposefully into the woman's nostrils, some wriggled into the folds of her ears, and some, after playing around on her skin, bounced right back out into the air. The woman simply pretended not to notice, her expression blank, and completely ignored the worms as if they were dandruff.
Only when the worms went too far, venturing near her eyes or mouth, would the woman slowly, methodically dig them out with a fingernail, flicking them away without a change in her detached demeanor.
She still walked through the crowded ration lines with that floor-length, matted hair, dragging the heavy, worm-packed mass behind her under everyone's stunned, horrified stares. When her head got too heavy from the weight, she would cradle the great bundle of hair and red nematodes in both arms like a baby and keep going, step by step. At night, to keep the red nematodes from roaming freely and disturbing her sleep, the woman wrapped her entire head and face in a thin scarf and let the red nematodes do as they pleased underneath, a nightly truce.
She told those who dared ask, "If you ignore them, they will die in a few days anyway from lack of something. Once they are dead, it is fine. They are just bugs." Her voice was flat, resigned.
But because the woman had to brave the torrential rain to get to the distribution point every day, the moment her hair got even a little wet from spray or mist, countless new red nematodes would swarm and latch onto it, adding to the mass. She ignored everyone's looks of pity and disgust. Wherever the woman passed, people silently stepped aside, giving her a wide berth. This wasn't someone you wanted to provoke, not out of fear of her, but out of a superstitious dread of the crawling fate she carried.
Only much later, through fragmented stories, did Jing Shu learn why the woman was like that. When the woman was eighteen, her childhood sweetheart had enlisted. Before leaving, he told her, "I will marry you when your hair grows long enough to reach your waist. Wait for me."
He never returned after his unit was sent to the front lines of the desperate rescue efforts during the catastrophic 2008 Sichuan earthquake. He was listed among the missing.
She never cut her hair again after that. To this day, she had not married, her hair a monument and then a prison.
If fate allowed it in this life, if their paths crossed again, Jing Shu wanted to see that woman again, to offer something, perhaps. The woman had once, silently, helped a younger, struggling Jing Shu lift a heavy sack of rice when no one else would, her worm-wrapped hands strong and steady.
…
Back in the present, under the shelter of their porch, Grandma Jing watched the silver curtain of rain for a long time, never getting enough of the sight, smiling from ear to ear, her face relaxed. The whole family stood clustered at the villa's doorway with their chopsticks still in hand, the forgotten hot pot steaming inside. Grandpa Jing said, "Good. This rain is just what we needed. The earth can drink its fill." His voice held pure, agricultural relief.
It was the perfect time to appreciate the foresight behind the PVC mega-canopy Jing Shu had insisted on setting up. The heavy downpour hit the sloped, clear surface and streamed cleanly off the four designated corners into the collection pipes, and a strip at least a meter wide outside the courtyard gate stayed completely dry thanks to the canopy's extended coverage, an umbrella for the ground.
Even the villa's walls didn't get splashed by ricocheting droplets. For extra safety, Jing Shu had still packed the interior corners of the house with bags of desiccant, preparing for the humidity that would follow.
Outside, under the edge of the canopy, Xiao Dou had danced in the initial rain, happy and reckless, but its enthusiastic clucks gradually sounded strained, wrong.
At the same time, as they listened, the community around them erupted into that rising chorus of wails and shrieks they had heard moments before.
"What is going on? What is happening?" Su Lanzhi asked, peering into the gloom.
Under the weak glow of their courtyard security lights, they seemed to see long, thin, dark red strands clinging all over Xiao Dou's body, especially around its feathered areas.
Xiao Dou looked much bigger, puffier all of a sudden, its silhouette distorted.
At last, with a distressed screech, Xiao Dou turned and flew-fluttered back toward the porch, staring pitifully at Jing Shu with its beady eyes for help. Xiao Dou's eyes blinked furiously, pleading.
Jing Shu put down her bowl and chopsticks on a side table, rushed forward, and used a big gardening fork from the wall to gently but firmly pin Xiao Dou down at the courtyard gate, preventing it from crossing the threshold. No way was she letting a chicken covered in unknown, writhing red nematodes into the clean villa.
Only under the bright courtyard lights did they see the infestation clearly. The family gasped in unison, a collective intake of breath. Grandma Jing even staggered back a step, hand to her chest. "Good heavens, what is that? Thank goodness I didn't go out there."
Jing An instinctively shielded Su Lanzhi behind him. "What bugs are those? Are they poisonous? Can we still it?"
"What do we do?" Su Lanzhi circled anxiously behind him, wringing her hands.
Xiao Dou looked absolutely horrific, a pitiful sight. It was miserable to behold.
Red nematodes poked their wriggling black-tipped ends out from everywhere, tangled thickly through Xiao Dou's glossy black feathers, on its red comb and wattles, in every patch of plumage, even along the scaled thighs.
It looked like a huge, seething, dark red net had wrapped around Xiao Dou's entire body. The bird pecked frantically at its own feathers, trying to bite the red nematodes off, but with one hard yank, Xiao Dou only tore out a clump of its own feathers instead, the worms still attached.
Even after ripping out a few tufts, the bare, pink patches of skin were instantly covered again by the dense, encroaching worms. The red nematodes twined around each other into tight, living ropes. There was no way to tear them off one by one; they were anchored to each other and to the feathers. They were tough, elastic, and they were united, a collective pest.
As the saying goes, unity is strength. A single chopstick breaks easily. A bundle of chopsticks does not. That was exactly what this was, a bundled infestation.
They clung like little parasitic vampires, binding Xiao Dou fast. Xiao Dou, the chicken always praised as a clever, fierce fighter against rats and snakes, had no solution this time, defeated by sheer numbers and tenacity.
Xiao Dou stared at Jing Shu, then looked down at its own infested body, then back at Jing Shu again, its head tilting, as if to say, please, get these damned bugs off me. I surrender.
"Should we use scissors and just cut them all off?" Grandma Jing suggested, horrified.
"Wouldn't that mean shaving all its feathers? This chicken would be bald." Jing An pointed out the obvious.
"This chicken is going bald for sure if we do that," Grandpa Jing concluded grimly.
A collective shiver ran through the family. The bugs themselves were terrifying enough, but the thought that the very rain carried so many of these pests was worse, a fundamental corruption of a life-giving resource. Xiao Dou had only taken one quick loop outside the dry zone and returned in this wretched state. Would it even be safe to set foot outside the shelter in the future?
Wu You'ai, who had been monitoring her phone, ran out from the dining room. "Don't go outside. There are tons of bugs in the rain, according to the community chat." She stopped short when she saw the entire family gathered around the pinned, miserable-looking Xiao Dou, which looked at everyone piteously and let out two weak, defeated clucks.
"The chat just blew up. Someone said they took a quick shower in the rain and their hair got instantly wrapped in countless thin, red bugs that wouldn't come off. Looks like these are the same bugs. So far, no reports that they actually bite or poison people, just that they cling and itch." She summarized the panic.
Still holding Xiao Dou down with the fork, Jing Shu told Wu You'ai, "Go get a bag of salt from the kitchen pantry. It should work on soft-bodied bugs like these." She remembered this trick from later survival lore.
Salt was the great nematode-killer, drawing moisture out through their skin.
But salt was precious, a carefully rationed commodity in the apocalypse. Most people didn't have enough surplus salt to waste on driving off red nematodes. In her previous life, Jing Shu would rather shave her own head bald than use precious salt on the worms. That was how rare and valuable salt had become.
"Oh, I get it!" Wu You'ai's eyes lit up with understanding. "Soft-bodied invertebrates like nematodes secrete and excrete directly through their skin. They are hyper-sensitive to changes in the osmotic balance between their internal fluids and the external environment. Salt raises the external fluid density and pulls water out of their cells via osmosis, making them shrivel and die. Jing Shu, you are so smart!" She dashed off to the kitchen to get the salt, her mind connecting textbook biology to the crisis.
Jing Shu stared after her: "???"
A top student was a top student. Say one sentence and Wu You'ai could instantly connect a dozen scientific concepts. Jing Shu had just learned the actual biological reason herself from the explanation. She felt a little guilty. If she could be reborn back to her school years with this mindset, she would study hard every day and keep far away from slackers, she mused.
Wu You'ai returned quickly with a half-full bag of coarse salt.
"Stand back, just in case they jump," Jing Shu said. She covered the pinned Xiao Dou with a large, woven grain sack as a hood, then carefully sprinkled a generous handful of salt evenly inside the sack around the chicken's body.
The family watched, tense and silent, from a few steps back. Xiao Dou caused a lot of trouble on normal days, sneaking Su Lanzhi's prized little white apricots from the tree whenever possible. She often chased her around the yard with a broom, while Xiao Dou reveled in the feeling of getting away with it, strutting afterward.
Even so, Xiao Dou had also brought the family endless laughter and a steady supply of eggs. No one wanted the hen to die, especially not from something as vile as worm suffocation.
There came a rapid series of faint thuds and frantic rustling against the inside of the sack cover, loud and violent at first as the nematodes reacted, then weaker, sporadic, and finally silent. Jing Shu waited a moment longer, then carefully lifted the edge of the sack. On the ground around Xiao Dou lay a carpet of hair-thin red bodies, curled together in death and utterly still.
Xiao Dou let out a long, comfortable, almost groaning sound and shook out its feathers vigorously. Aside from the few small, self-inflicted bald patches it had plucked in panic, everything else was intact. The feathers were damp but worm-free. Xiao Dou was back, its spirit returning.
But when Xiao Dou glanced warily toward the falling rain beyond the porch again, there was a new, deep wariness in its eyes. It lowered its head, glared at the piled dead red nematodes, and, with a series of vindictive, furious clucks, pecked and ate every last one of them, a crunchy revenge.
"That scared me half to death. This chicken really is tough," Su Lanzhi said, patting her chest in relief. She stepped forward and grabbed Xiao Dou, hurrying it inside toward its coop. "We will see if you still feel like fooling around out there now. Learn your lesson." Her scolding was affectionate, her hands gentle as she checked the bird for any remaining worms.