Chapter Ninety-Eight: The Wind in the North
The deafening sound shook the whole building. Listening to the sound, the security door is estimated to be not lightly injured.
"Something suddenly occurred to me." After the explosion, Cheng Jiahua looked upstairs and suddenly said.
"What's the matter?" I asked him.
"My box is still in the back of the pickup truck," Cheng Jiahua said, "I forgot to remove it, do you think the contents will get wet?" β
I must have remembered something, it was an inconsequential question, and I was speechless for a moment. I said, "Uncle Wang will definitely bring you into the car when he sees it." β
Cheng Jiahua nodded with some concern.
Zhiwa stood in front of the staircase, closed her eyes and covered her ears, blocking the stairs as we went upstairs. Uncle Zhang walked up and slapped him on the back, and said sharply: "What are you covering, it's all blown up, hurry upstairs, don't get in the way!" β
Zhiwa opened her eyes, put down her hands, looked upstairs with wide eyes, and said, "Ringing?" β
"Do you still think it's a double cannon?" Uncle Zhang said and pushed Zhiwa upstairs.
Everyone trotted all the way back to the fifth floor. The wooden-handled grenade worked, and a large hole was blown out of the door lock, and it is estimated that the part of the door lock was blown away. The security door has been opened, and Wu Linyu's shadow is nowhere to be seen, so he must have entered the room.
We know that the grenades commonly used by infantry have not only the damage caused by the shock wave when they explode, but also the fragments that are sputtered to inflict a blow on the enemy. So we see that on the door opposite this security door, as well as on a certain area of the wall next to it, there are small metal fragments embedded in it. The fragments, which resembled small pieces of iron, mixed with wood slag, also fell all over the ground.
Zhou Zhihong stretched out his hand, touched the fragments embedded in the door and said, "Can this thing still fly out of the iron block?" β
Cheng Jiahua rubbed the splinters on the ground with the soles of his shoes and said: "If someone stood here with me just now, even if he couldn't be killed, he would have to be disfigured and blinded by these small fragments." β
"That's why when I was a kid, I didn't put it in a glass bottle." I laughed. Actually, I did this with my cousin when I was a kid, but luckily I didn't get into any trouble.
Uncle Zhang checked the big hole in the security door, put on a mask, opened the door and walked inside. We followed in his footsteps and squeezed through the door.
As expected, the room was filled with a rancid smell. I felt a sense of joy that at least the grenade hadn't exploded in vain. The decoration of the house is very simple, or rather poor, and there are no floor tiles. The whole house is also very narrow in size, with two bedrooms and a toilet. There are only a few kinds of furniture inside, a dining table, a few wooden sofas, old-fashioned cabinets stacked in the corner of the living room, and a color TV on it.
The dining table was also covered with a cover to keep out flies and insects, and Wu Linyu's camouflage bag was placed on a chair next to the table.
Wu Linyu walked out of a bedroom, and while putting on plastic gloves, he said, "I've seen it, there are four of them." β
Four dead people, more than you could imagine. A few blue uniforms piled on top of the wooden couch are the kind worn by factory workers. It occurred to me that this might be a share house for workers in the neighborhood.
But it doesn't matter anymore, whatever they used to do, it's just a pile of carrion to us now. No one wanted to stay in the stinking room for a minute longer, so Uncle Zhang took off his mink coat and called us to work. Zhou Zhihong stayed where he was, looking at a calendar hanging on the wall, and did not follow us towards the bedroom. I went back and asked him what he was looking at.
"I'm looking to see when the New Year will come." Zhou Zhihong put down his hand flipping the calendar, turned his head and smiled at me.
The bodies were removed from the bedroom and stacked in the living room. The people in the house were all lying in bed and dying in their sleep. It was easy for us, we just had to wrap up the sheets and quilt and carry them out of the bedroom.
"What's next? Do you want to move down? Cheng Jiahua looked at the four corpses that were wrapped and said.
"That's too much trouble." Wu Linyu answered.
Uncle Zhang held his glasses with his arm and said, "Just throw it down, it's too tiring to move down." β
"Throw it down? Wouldn't that fall to death," I exclaimed, but halfway through the sentence, I realized that they were already dead.
"That's it," Cheng Jiahua said as he bent down and pinched the end of the sheet, "I don't want to carry these dead people all the way to the fifth floor." β
Wu Linyu also bent down and grabbed the other end of the sheet, turned his head to look at the window of the living room and said, "Fortunately, there is no anti-theft net here." β
Uncle Zhang then picked up the sheet wrapped in the other two corpses, and then handed me a look and motioned for me to help him. I grabbed the other end of the sheet slowly, still thinking about whether it would be appropriate to throw the body downstairs. Although I can't think of anything wrong with that. Of course, if I were asked to carry these corpses down five floors, I would not be willing to.
After hesitating, Uncle Zhang lifted one end of the sheet and led me to put the body in front of the window. Wu Linyu and Cheng Jiahua carried the ends of the sheet and looked out the window.
"There's no one downstairs, you can throw it." Cheng Jiahua retracted his head and said.
"That's it." As he spoke, Wu Linyu bit his lip and lifted the sheet.
Zhou Zhihong and Zhiwa helped push the window wider so that it was wide enough to pass through the corpse. But the window was so narrow that even if it was fully opened, it would not reach the length of the corpse. Wu Linyu and Cheng Jiahua had no choice but to put one end of the corpse out diagonally, and then stretched out their hands to push the two corpses wrapped in sheets out of the window.
Within two seconds, there was a muffled sound downstairs.
Zhou Zhihong leaned out of the window, shook his head and said, "It hurts to hear, but fortunately they are dead." β
"So if you want to commit suicide, don't choose to jump off the building, it's not only painful, but also humiliating." Cheng Jiahua leaned on the window, looked downstairs and said.
Listening to their conversation in front of the windowsill, I was also curious to go and see. But Uncle Zhang smacked me with his tongue and lifted the sheet again, meaning that it was our turn.
Learning from Wu Linyu's previous method, Uncle Zhang held the other end of the sheet and placed the body diagonally on the windowsill. A small, unknown black bug crawled down the long hair of the corpse onto my glove. I subconsciously let go of my hands and shook off the bugs. Since the part of my body that protruded from the window was heavier, as soon as I let go of my hand, the corpse slid out under the attraction of gravity.
Before I could approach the window, there was another muffled noise downstairs. I squeezed a spot out of the window and looked down. The four bodies fell literally downstairs, lying in the rain-soaked street. The sheets and quilts that had wrapped them before had been torn apart, revealing the hideous face of the corpse itself. The four corpses staggered on the ground in various strange poses, like puppets that had fallen to the ground. Especially the last two corpses that Uncle Zhang and I threw down, their kneecaps had been broken, and their rotting calves were bent at angles that a living person couldn't do.
I haven't seen the jumping scene, but I guess the jumping scene should be similar to the picture in front of me, just like Cheng Jiahua said, it is both painful and humiliating. The quilts and sheets were draped over the corpses' shorts and wrapped around their arms like shrouds.
Wu Linyu stepped on the armrest of the wooden sofa next to the windowsill and leaned out of the window. He looked outside for a while and said, "The house next door doesn't have an anti-theft net, so I think I can turn it over." β
Uncle Zhang also stretched out his head to take a look and said, "It should be no problem, but will it be a little too dangerous?" β
"yes, it's slippery in the rain." I touched the wet windowsill and echoed, "Don't you still have a wound on your leg?" β
There were only twenty or thirty centimeters of tiles between this window sill and the window next door, and if it was on the second floor, I was completely confident that I would be able to climb through it.
"I have removed the gauze this morning, it doesn't hurt the bones, it doesn't get in the way." Wu Linyu replied, and then jumped off the wooden sofa, as if to testify about his words.
"Don't blow the door with a grenade?" Zhou Zhihong asked.
"Where did you come from so much, you and I am here in the Ministry of Armed Forces?" Wu Linyu pushed the window to the middle as he spoke, and stepped back on the wooden sofa. Looks like he's really ready to flip over.
"That's going to be steady, it's no joke." Cheng Jiahua is colorful.
"I understand." Wu Linyu licked his lips and stood on the windowsill.
The whole process was easier than I thought it would be, and it was quicker than I thought. Wu Linyu clasped the window frame with one hand and stretched out one leg to step on the windowsill next door. His other hand, his left, fastened the frame of the window sill next door, and then flipped over. The whole process takes less than five seconds.
Seeing him safely enter the house next door, we all breathed a sigh of relief. It seems that it is necessary to install an anti-theft net, but if you think about it, there is nothing to steal in this rental house.
Then, we walked back to the stairwell, stood in front of the anti-theft door embedded with fragments, and waited for Wu Linyu to open the door. This room was a lot more messy than the one next door, but it had a little more furniture, at least with floor tiles. There was only one body in the house, and we threw it downstairs the same way we had done it. Wu Linyu tore down the curtains in the living room, saying that he would let us hang him downstairs and open the door for us.
This Wu Linyu turned out to be a master who loves to play with his life.
But he has good arm strength, so it's fine. Thanks to Wu Linyu's good physical condition, we followed this method, and in about the morning, except for a family on the second floor that had installed an anti-theft net, the corpses of the entire building were emptied by us.
After a morning of activities, we sat in front of the window on the second floor. The sleet outside hadn't stopped, and I saw Cheng Jiahua take off his gloves and take out the little red notebook from last night and write.
"I didn't expect it to be so easy," Uncle Zhang took out his cigarettes and handed them to me and Wu Linyu, "thanks to this young man." β
After speaking, Uncle Zhang patted Wu Linyu's shoulder. Wu Linyu took the cigarette, smiled, and did not answer.
βfinishοΌβ Cheng Jiahua wrote and wrote a sentence in foreign language.
"What are you writing about?" I leaned over to him curiously.
Cheng Jiahua put away the pen and handed the notebook to me: "I wrote it last night, and now I have completed the last sentence, come, you come and give your opinions." β
I asked Wu Linyu to take a fire, lit the cigarette in his mouth, and took the notebook. Full of three pages, it turned out to be a poem:
My friend got on the September train to say goodbye to me,
He said he was going to the steppes of the north, full of freedom.
He said that the ideal footsteps will not stop for anyone,
The September wind will blow his back away.
I don't know if he'll be in the winter,
Back to the South,
With his October ideals.
Goodbye friends, bring this bottle of wine that belongs to youth.
And my guitar, no more sorrow.
The wind of the north has broken his strings,
He returned, but he couldn't bring back the vast grasslands.
Not a drop left, this bottle of wine called youth.
It's okay friends,
We have long since lost our youthful dreams.
"Young dreams?" I took the cigarette from my mouth and said, "Okay, I didn't see that you still have this kind of talent." β
Cheng Jiahua stood up and said with a smile: "If you want to sing good songs, you can't sing other people's songs for a lifetime, you have to bring something original." β
I nodded, then read them again, and asked him, "Don't you want to go west, how do you write about the wind in the north?" β
Dawn