In the apartment building, the number of poisonous insects is slightly beyond Li Ang's imagination.

Crime, corruption and poverty are among the three major ills of Philippine society.

Before Duterte launched the anti-drug war, there were already readers who relied on the big stick of money and power to knock on the door of the upper class.

From the Philippine grassroots police officers to the Philippine Minister of Justice Li Lima, half of the Philippine administrative law enforcement agencies are involved in the chain of interest in reading materials.

Of the 100 million people in the Philippines, there are 3.7 million students, and this number is growing wildly every day.

Poverty, corruption, backwardness, ignorance, each of these factors is driving the expansion of reading.

A large number of Filipino young people and even young people who have not received basic education, have not been properly disciplined by their parents, have no serious jobs, and have no hope at all, have become poisonous insects.

In order to get more funds to buy reading materials, many people even joined various gangs and took the initiative to enter this black chain of interests.

It is really difficult to define whether the so-called "civilians" living in this apartment building are really just ordinary people who are slightly involved in drugs, or members of the chain of interest in reading books.

Seventeen or eighteen, fourteen or fifteen years old, and even Filipinos of twelve or thirteen years old, wandered in the corridors.

They were either armed with pistols or machetes, in groups of three or five, shouting loudly.

At the beginning of the special operations team's entry into the building, in order to reduce the losses of his subordinates,

The public address system was used to tell all the residents of the building that if they killed or eliminated a special operations operator, they would be exempted from all rents and receive one million Philippine pesos from him, or a reading book of equivalent value.

After the special operations squad was broken up by the regular gangs, these thin and small young men bravely walked out of the room and wandered through the corridors.

They were armed with pistols and machetes, and their blades kept tapping against the ceramic walls of the hallway, making a tinkling sound, and their eyes were full of thirst for money.

A thin boy in a red shirt violently kicked open the door of a certain room,

He rushed into the house with a machete, glanced around, and saw faint traces of blood on the ground, which pointed to the bedroom.

Red Shirt took the machete and lay silently on the ground, seeing something through the crack in the bedroom door.

He got up excitedly, ran down the hallway, palm on the door frame, and shouted excitedly to his wandering companions, "There are people here!" ”

"Who?"

"It's coming, it's coming!"

A crowd shouted in a mess and rushed into the house, huddled together, and violently smashed open the bedroom door with the hilt of a knife.

Behind the bedroom door was a young woman, and on the bed in the bedroom lay an old woman with a yellow complexion, the smell of herbs in the air.

The woman glared at the group of teenagers and shouted, "What are you doing?!" ”

Her name is Ligaya, and according to Filipino customs, she is often referred to as "joy"

(Filipinos, regardless of gender, age, status, all have a catchy nickname, such as Junjun, Big Ghost, Dingdong, Lingling, Qiaoqiao)

The red-shirted boy stared at Joy for a moment, a smile flashed across his face, pushed him away, came to the bed, and lay on the ground.

Under the bed, a special operations operator lies on his back.

His right arm and left leg had been wounded by bullets and were bleeding profusely.

The operator struggled to pick up the gun, and the red shirt bounced off the ground, hugged Joy, and shouted under the bed, "If you dare to shoot, she'll die!" ”

With that, the red shirt made a color to the left and right companions, and the two teenagers jumped onto the bed, rolled over to the other side, turned sideways, and dragged the operator out from under the bed.

The operator tried to raise the gun to fight back, but was kicked away from the firearm, and he was kicked in the face several times, a tooth flew out, and his face instantly swollen.

"Rip off his coat!"

The red shirt let go of joy, and the teenagers happily dragged the operator to the living room,

Some people ripped off the operators' body armor and put them on themselves, some people waved the operators' walkie-talkies, and some people held heavy pistols to play back and forth.

The red shirt looked at the elated companion, turned away, looked at Miss Joy, who was forced to be calm, and said with a wicked smile, "Are you harboring him?" ”

Joy shook his head, looked at this face that was once familiar, but now extremely unfamiliar, and said stiffly: "He has a gun, he coerced me, Kaka, you should go home." ”

The boy with the nickname Kaka looked at the shirt that Happy was wearing, and the shriveled but well-defined body under the shirt, and licked his lips,

Joy is not a drug person, she lives in this building simply for the cheap rent here.

Kaka used to love joy - when he was an innocent teenager.

But how beautiful the fantasy is, how cruel the reality is,

How can such a woman who has no job support herself, and even have money to treat her mother, who is seriously ill in bed.

The answer is self-explanatory.

Kaka stared at Joy, his eyes were a little red, Joy seemed to realize something, and his trembling body paused,

She said with difficulty, "Don't be in the bedroom." ”

Kaka grinned, stuck the machete into the belt around his waist, and pulled Joy to the balcony.

At this time, the group of teenagers were still punching and kicking the operator, and after not hearing any screams, they happily picked up the machete, ready to cut off the operator's head.

Da –

The sound of gunfire, short and resolute, rang out by the doorframe.

There stood a swarthy barrel.

The teenager who was about to slash with a machete was shot in the head, his body convulsed, and he fell to the ground.

Before the group of teenagers could digest the death that had happened in front of them, a gunshot rang out.

The second person fell to the ground in response, and the same shot was a headshot, and the blood mist was filled.

The companion who was splashed with red and white things was about to scream, but he was hit in the bridge of his nose by a bullet that came from nowhere, and his whole face was sunken.

Da, da.

One bullet, one gunshot, one life.

When did the teenagers in the living room suffer such fear, they either crawled on the floor to the sofa, or got up and ran towards the bedroom.

But the muzzle of the gun erected on the side of the door frame, as if it had eyes, tracked their body trajectory, and delivered the bullet to them firmly and gently.

The gunfire finally stopped, and the living room was littered with corpses, less than three seconds after the first gunshot.

On the balcony, Kaka, who was still in the posture of tearing his belt, squatted on the ground with joy.

In front of the floor-to-ceiling window of the balcony, there is just a pile of cardboard boxes with some miscellaneous items in it.

Tread, step, step.

The sound of footsteps stamping on blood in the military boots sounded in the living room, and Leon sniffed the rich smell of blood and muttered to himself, "There is still one left." ”

One more missing,

On the balcony, Kaka's body shuddered suddenly, and he pulled out his pistol, sticking to the cardboard box to shoot.

However, the living room was empty, and Kaka subconsciously looked up and saw that Leon had reached the edge of the balcony at some point.

The muzzle of the pistol in the black hole was facing Kaka's head, and at this moment, Kaka remembered a lot of things.

His father, who abandoned his wife and children and didn't know where to fool around, the mother who made money by washing clothes to supplement the family, but was so tired that she fell ill and died,

The younger brother who follows his ass all day long, the so-called "gang brother" who gives himself a piece of colorful stickers and drags himself into the abyss...

Those people, those things.

If he hadn't accepted the colorful stickers handed to him by his big brother in the gang that day, maybe he wouldn't have become addicted to reading, and he wouldn't have dropped out of school and moved into this damn apartment with his younger brother, who was supposed to have a bright future.

If he is given another chance, he will definitely study hard and take his younger brother to find a decent job in the city, as his mother told him before she died.

Ah, I almost forgot, his brother is also dead, in the living room, the same one who raised the knife just now.

Smack-

The dull sound of the silenced pistol rang out, and Kaka's forehead was filled with a bloody hole, and a flattering smile of a teenager was frozen on his face.

Another corpse fell to the ground, and Li Ang didn't even look at it, and said to the joy that was squatting on the ground, his face was covered with blood, and he couldn't speak because of excessive fright: "Are you okay?" ”

"Ah, I, I'm fine." Happy stammered.

"Good." Leon nodded, walked back to the living room, dragged the bruised-nosed and swollen operator out of the pile of corpses, bandaged his wound a little, and placed it on the living room couch.

"Help me take care of him."

Li Ang casually ordered: "When the gunfire stops at all, you can send him to the hospital again, okay?" ”

"Uh, okay."

Nodding happily, he watched as Leon expertly removed grenades, shock grenades, rifle magazines and other equipment from the corpses of those teenagers, pushed the door and left.