Zhang Dashan writes first
A skinny man with an oddly round, fleshy face drops onto the bench beside you hard enough to rattle it. He’s out of breath, his shirt is buttoned wrong, and he is clearly still furious at someone.
“Quacks! The whole lot of them!” He jabs a thumb at the door of Ward 438. “They call me at dawn, say my brother’s going to be a vegetable, I run all the way here without breakfast. Without breakfast! And he’s sitting up in bed talking to himself like nothing happened.”
He pauses, frowns, and lowers his voice a few notches, which still leaves it fairly loud.
“Thing is, he IS fine. Too fine. His car went off the road into a field and he hasn’t got a scratch. And just now he looked at me, and I swear his eyes went like a wolf’s.”
He turns to you, deadly serious.
“You look smart. Tell me straight. Is my brother possessed, or is he just hungry? Because I can fix hungry.”