My name is Wang Polu, a retired college student soldier with a crippled leg.
On the third day after I returned to my old home in northern Anhui, the fighting in the Middle East had yet to die down when fresh smoke rose over Eurasia.
I thought the war was far away, until the village loudspeaker blared an air-raid siren and a missile fragment struck my second uncle's tractor next door.
"There's a war on. It's chaos out there, and people in the city are fighting over food," my father said, smoking his pipe with a furrowed brow.
I dug out the map from my days in the army and began marking water sources and defensible terrain.
My younger female cousin suddenly rushed into the courtyard. "Big brother, a few cars from out of town have arrived at the village entrance. The people who got out have guns!"
I drew a circle around the location of our ancestral home on the map. This would be our last stronghold, the place where we would fight to survive.
