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The zombie apocalypse broke out in 1985.
The very first cases sprung up together. Most of Britain fell early, and then the refugees fleeing to Northern Scotland were killed in the Edinburgh and Glasgow massacres. Rural parts of Asia and South America held out for a while, but zombies were eternal. So long as they could smell you, they would never stop.
Well. For most people, that was the case.
It was in 1987 that Ace finally managed to get a working military-grade radio, and figure out how to operate it. Some of the old military relay stations were still in use, and she used to listen to the messages passing through them.
She’d known people who did send out messages, though she hadn’t been able to figure out how to respond at the time. There had been a Peri Brown, from America, but she’d been in Wales by the time the apocalypse broke out, and a Millie Zush somewhere south, who only spoke in Morse, and a Karra in London, and a Gwen Pritchard, trapped in a mansion in England.
Sometimes they’d talk, whatever ones of them were regulars at the time. Ace used to lie in bed and just listen to their conversations, for hours on end, but slowly, surely, they’d all winked out. Peri had said she got sick, and had slowly tapered out. Millie had talked about leaving, and then there’d been nothing since. Karra had been the worst - turned on air. Ace had listened for hours. Then Gwen had said she was burning down the mansion and getting out in the chaos, and she’d never turned up on the radio again.
It was that desperate, painful loneliness that had lead to her taking the risk of going south, further away from the remote fort she’d situated herself in, to Tain, which had a radio she could use.
She sent a message out every two hours till she needed to sleep, and then repeated this pattern for two more days before she heard the crackle of a response during the early afternoon.
“Hello?” she repeated into it. “Hello? My name is Ace McShane, and I’m in Scotland, at Tain. Are you a survivor as well?”
She heard what sounded, at first, like gibberish. Then she slowly realised the radio was working.
“Hello?” she repeated. “I don’t understand. Can you speak English?”
The line quietened, then, after a moment, came a quiet “No.”
Shit. But Ace persevered. For hours they talked back and forth. Ace had no idea what the woman was saying, and the dash of English the woman seemed to understand was slim indeed, but they both listened nonetheless.
“What’s your name?” Ace asked several times, and it seemed to take a while before the woman actually understood.
“Lǐ Xiǎo Yún.”
“Li Shou Yuing?”
“Xiǎo Yún.”
“Shou Yuing? Is that your name?”
She was quiet for a moment. “Shou Yuing,” she assented, eventually.
“My name is Ace.”
Shou Yuing didn’t get that.
They stayed like this for another day or two, just talking to each other and not understanding, before Ace abandoned the base for a day to go into town. This she only did for essentials, but not going insane was an essential too, wasn’t it? She took as many Chinese-English and English-Chinese dictionaries as she could find in the book shop, and brought a pile of them to the radio room when she next started talking.
Ace butchered her way through ‘do you speak Cantonese’ and gotten no response in the affirmative, so started on the Mandarin phrasebook next, really hoping Shou Yuing wasn’t speaking some obscure rural dialect there wasn’t a phrasebook for, but it took just a few words before Shou Yuing had brightened and started talking through the radio again. “Shu,” Ace could only respond, weakly attempting to keep her voice steady.
“Shū,” Shou Yuing corrected.
From there, conversations became slowly more organised. Both of them approached each other’s languages with a rather careless attitude to proper grammar at first, considering they were just translating their sentences word-by-word by way of their dictionaries, but it had been so long since she’d actually spoken with another person that Ace was content with anything.
Shou Yuing, from what she could gather, lived in Beijing. She was in a government or military building, and was living off the food and water inside. Like Ace, she was for some reason scentless to the zombies, and though their dictionaries made it hard for them to really talk about the nitty-gritty details, Ace was able to ascertain that Shou Yuing had no idea why she was the way she was, and didn’t know of anyone else who was alive.
“You think,” she said, one day, “we are the only people alive, ma?”
“Wǒ bù zhī dào.”
Ace sighed. “I suppose we can’t. Not for sure.”
She returned to town to buy grammar books. She didn’t bother with characters, focusing on the pinyin - and thank god for the pinyin - instead. She didn’t know what an IPA was, but trial-and-error made her pronunciation tolerable, and she just spoke slowly and exaggerated her tones as much as she could. Shou Yuing seemed terribly amused, but Ace was understood. She was eventually able to actually say ‘Xiǎo Yún’, but Shou Yuing politely declined, and so Ace’s first attempt at the woman’s name it was.
As it turned out, Shou Yuing had learnt some English in school before the apocalypse, and so their conversations shifted a little bit more towards that. Still, with the low number of zombies nearby, and the lack of threat, she had plenty of free time, and threw herself into learning Mandarin. Shou Yuing’s days were empty too, so almost from the time Ace got up and set up the radio till Shou Yuing went to sleep they would talk. Sometimes about themselves - Shou Yuing had planned to be a chemist, it turned out; she found an English textbook just so she and Ace could discuss it -, sometimes just to practice, and sometimes just to listen to another human being.
It was some months into this when Ace heard the first crackle through the line, and Shou Yuing’s voice became distorted. She’d been fidgeting, listening as Shou Yuing read the English textbook aloud, and correcting any mistakes she made in pronunciation.
“Shou Yuing?” she asked. “Shou Yuing, nǐ hái hǎo ma?”
It continued for several minutes longer, till she heard Shou Yuing’s confused voice through the line.
“Ace?”
“Shou Yuing? Nǐ -”
“I’m alright. I’m alright.”
They brought out the dictionaries again. The radio signal was decaying, and as they talked Ace realised there was a new distortion to their words that she thought hadn’t been there before, or had progressed so gradually she hadn’t even realised it at all.
After that, they tried talking less, in the hopes that that might solve it, but it didn’t. The distortion was slowly getting worse. One night, Ace woke up from a nightmare, where she and Shou Yuing had been talking long into the night, before a loud crackle sounded and the line went dead.
They argued about it the next day. Shou Yuing said it was inevitable that the radio would go down, that they’d been running on borrowed time for months already, and Ace said maybe they could hold on, maybe they could fix it. Shou Yuing said she wasn’t thinking.
Ace went to bed feeling sicker than she had in a year.
The next day she waited for Shou Yuing to come on the line. It was several hours past their normal time when she did.
“Hey, Ace.”
“Look, duì bù qǐ. I was wrong.”
Shou Yuing sighed. “Wǒ yuán liàng nǐ.” She was quiet for a few more moments. “I’m scared I will lose you, Ace.”
Ace chewed on her lip. “That was why I… I was being like that.” In the absence of an answer, she sighed, and leant a little closer to the mic. “I’ve thought about it, and I have an idea.”
“Yes?”
“You could come to Britain.”
That stunned her.
“I can not.”
“You could drive to Calais from Beijing -”
“I don’t know what Calais is. What about the sea?”
“It’s a French town. You could drive there and take a boat across.”
“I don’t know how to drive a boat.”
“You could try.”
“I could die.”
Ace closed her eyes. “If you did, we… could be together.” When Shou Yuing didn’t respond, Ace rubbed her face tiredly. “I’m sorry.” She wondered, for a moment, if Shou Yuing had thought something else about her phrasing.
“I might.” The words were small, but at them hope hit Ace so hard she was left breathless.
The very next day, Shou Yuing agreed that she would. It took a while to get the route sorted, and to plan the details, but finally she was about to set off.
“I will wait for you at the lighthouse," said Ace, just as the sun set for Shou Yuing. “It will still work. If it won’t, then I’ll fix it.”
“It will bring zombies.”
“It’ll make the journey safer for you.” She rubbed sleep from her eyes. “Take care.”
“I will.”
Ace made the trip down at dusk. By the end of the week, she abandoned the car and walked slowly down to the white cliffs, staring over the sea. She really, really hoped Shou Yuing was out there somewhere, and still coming her way.
True to Shou Yuing’s predictions, there was a small crowd of zombies there, drawn to its brightness in the night. Ace held her breath, but none of them smelt her. She dug into her bag for a few cans, then placed them down and pulled one of the fuses.
A minute later, there was an explosion. The crowd approached, then the rest of the cans exploded at once, and they were all destroyed.
Ace went up into the lighthouse, laying out her supplies. She made sure it was empty, then headed up to the top.
“I’ll wait for you as long as it takes, Shou Yuing,” she whispered.
When she did finally see it, almost a week later, she started crying. She wrapped a shawl around herself, and when came near enough to the cliffs she grabbed a lantern and ran out and down.
She stood there, holding the light up, as the boat came into view. She waded into the water to pull it in, then Shou Yuing almost jumped into her arms, and Ace saw her for the first time.
As the light flashed over her in pulses, Ace thought she’d never seen anyone so beautiful. Shou Yuing couldn’t get out words; she was crying straight into Ace’s shoulder, and soon Ace realised she was crying too. She pulled off her shawl and wrapped it tightly around Shou Yuing’s shoulders.
“I’m here,” she whispered. “I’m here, Shou Yuing, I’m here.”
She led her up the cliffs and into the lighthouse by the hand. They sat in the little adjoined cottage together, and Ace looked through the cupboards for tea, making them both a cup. Shou Yuing held the cup so tightly it might crack.
“Míng tiān,” said Ace, “zán liǎ qù Scotland.”
Shou Yuing smiled tiredly. “Yes,” she said.
Ace switched to English as well. “We can go further north,” she said. “It will be quiet. And cold. But safe.” She reached out to touch Shou Yuing’s hip. “You won’t regret this, I promise.”
“Thank you, Ace.”
“Of course.”
They sat, glorying in the other’s presence, inching closer and closer towards the fire - towards each other - long into the night.