The Last Order

It rained harder that night than it had all summer.

Lao Zhou had been delivering food for three years. He had seen every kind of weather. But the rain on July nineteenth was something else. The wipers on his scooter were useless at full speed. His phone, sealed in a waterproof pouch mounted on the handlebars, kept pinging. Heavy rain meant weather bonuses, two extra yuan per order. Lao Zhou gritted his teeth and accepted one more.

The order went to the western suburbs. The address on the map said Cuiping Mountain Villa, Number Two. He knew Cuiping Mountain, an old villa district built in the nineties west of town. After they dug a tunnel through the hill, the residents all moved to the new development zone. The area was mostly empty now. But the road was open, just far.

The restaurant was an all-night congee shop. Lao Zhou picked up from there all the time. The owner glanced at the order slip and paused. Who orders a bowl of mung bean congee and a side of pickled vegetables at this hour, she said. The delivery fee costs more than the food.

Lao Zhou stuffed the container into his thermal box and pulled on his raincoat. He was soaked through. The raincoat was for show.

Forty minutes to the foot of Cuiping Mountain. The road going up was a single lane lined with paulownia trees. The branches thrashed in the headlight like fingers. The rain had gotten worse. Standing water on the road came halfway up his tires. He cranked the phone volume to max. The navigation voice cut in and out through the downpour: in two hundred meters, turn left.

He turned left onto a gravel road. Dead branches and fallen leaves covered the surface, crunching under his wheels. The streetlights had been out for a long time. His headlight was the only source of light, and even that dissolved into a smear of bright dots in the rain.

The navigation said: you have arrived.

Lao Zhou looked up. His headlight caught a stone wall, thick with moss, an iron gate ajar. A plaque read Cuiping Mountain Villa, the gold lettering flaked down to rust stains. Behind the gate was pitch black. You couldn't see anything, not even the silhouette of a building.

He honked twice. No answer. He called the number on the order. It rang three times and cut off, the automatic kind. He called again. Three rings, cutoff. The third time, someone picked up.

A woman's voice, soft, like she was speaking through a layer of something: just leave it at the door.

Lao Zhou said there was nowhere to leave it, the rain was too heavy. The woman said behind the stone lion. Only then did he notice the two stone lions flanking the gate, small ones, waist-high. He set the food container behind one of them and was turning to leave when the voice on the phone said: it's already paid.

He said he knew. The woman said: thank you for the trouble. The road down is rough. Take it slow.

Lao Zhou started the scooter and made a U-turn. As the headlight swept across the stone wall, he caught something in the rearview mirror. A figure behind the gate, in white, standing in the rain. He thought his eyes were playing tricks on him. He had just looked. There had been nothing.

He didn't look back. He rode all the way down, back into the city.

The next afternoon, Lao Zhou went through his order history looking for that customer's rating. He couldn't find the order. He scrolled again and again, from nine last night to two in the morning. Nothing for Cuiping Mountain Villa. The list was all completed orders, nothing missing. He checked his earnings. The weather subsidy plus delivery fees came to over forty yuan, all deposited. But item by item, the few yuan for that bowl of congee were gone.

He called platform support. The agent looked it up and said there was indeed an order to Cuiping Mountain Villa last night, accepted at three past midnight, delivered at forty-one past midnight. The order number was there. The delivery track was there. But three hours later, around three in the morning, the order was voided.

The system didn't say why.

Lao Zhou called the congee shop owner. She heard him out, paused, and said the bowl you picked up last night was the last one. This morning I put a fresh pot on the stove. The congee came out thick, way too thick. I stirred and stirred and couldn't get it smooth. At the bottom there was a black patch, like something had burned.

Lao Zhou hung up and sat on the edge of his rented bed for a long time. He thought about the last thing the woman said: take it slow going down.

It hit him then. All the way down the mountain that night, not a single car had passed. Cuiping Mountain was deserted, but there were villages at the base of it. No matter how late, there should have been a light or two on. But the whole ride down, in the rearview mirror, the entire mountain was black.

Like someone had blown out every light.