Prologue
February 10.
On Belgium’s E40 motorway, the snow lay thick, and the cars were moving at an excruciatingly slow pace.
She scrolled through the webpages. There were already news reports estimating the consequences of this snow disaster: a line of cars stretching for more than 900 kilometers. Who knew when it would finally come to an end?
More than 900 kilometers? If there were some kind of aerial footage now, it would probably make for a truly astonishing piece of historical documentation.
She pressed her hand against the car window, leaving a small, neither too large nor too small, mark in the misted glass.
The car was not large, and there were four people squeezed into the back seat alone.
None of them were particularly close classmates. The boy beside her, especially, was someone she had only seen three or four times. He wore black-and-white mountaineering clothes. His face was very pale, his eyes a light brown, and there was something faintly feminine about him.
She only remembered that he was not from the same department as her. If her roommate had not so warmly invited her along, there was no way she would have squeezed in here and shared a seat with him. The two people sitting across from him, however, were students from her department.
Because of the prolonged slow drive and traffic jam, the two of them had long since curled themselves into a ball in each other’s arms. They whispered to each other in Spanish, slowly kissing, their voices low and languid.
She slept fitfully for a while. When she woke again, she discovered that the car had come to a complete stop.
The boy beside her was sitting in a very awkward position, avoiding the couple in the other seat. One hand was braced against the seat in front and the other rested on his own knee. Because his legs were long, he had no choice but to turn sideways and press himself close against her.
In such a position, naturally, his gaze fell upon her.
She smiled at him sympathetically and asked in a low voice, “Can you speak Chinese?”
“What do you want to say?” He smiled, his voice clear as water.
“Anything.” She looked at him sleepily. “They can’t understand us anyway. What’s your name? I mean your Chinese name.”
“Cheng Mu.”
“Nan Bei.” She shifted herself backward a little to give him more room. “Nan from dong-nan-xi-bei, Bei from dong-nan-xi-bei.”
东南西北 (dong nan xi bei) literally means “east, south, west, north,” the four cardinal directions. Here, Nan Bei is explaining the characters 南 and 北 that make up her name.
“Nan Bei?”
“Mm.”
“Nan Bei.”
“Huh?”
“Nothing. I asked all your classmates, and no one knew your Chinese name. I didn’t expect it to be so simple.”
“Easy to remember, right?” she said with a quiet laugh.
“The surname is distinctive, and the given name is distinctive too. You really would remember it after hearing it just once.”
They talked for a while, but she grew colder and colder. Since no one knew how long the traffic would remain at a standstill, the air conditioning had been turned off long ago. In weather this freezing, even the couple in the front seats responsible for driving had begun flirting to keep warm.
Beside her was one.
In front of her was another.
The boy in front of her was also looking at her, and she was studying him in turn. In a space like this, it was truly easy to tempt someone into sin.
She said softly, “More than 900 kilometers. It sounds pretty hopeless.”
Cheng Mu took a small silver flask from his clothes and lightly tapped the back of her hand with it. “This highway is more than 8,000 kilometers long in total. If you think about it that way, doesn’t 900 kilometers suddenly seem insignificant?”
She took the little flask and unscrewed the cap, giving it a sniff. “Very strong?”
“Extremely.”
She lowered her head and took a small sip. The liquor burned so badly that she stuck out her tongue. “Are you drinking straight alcohol?”
“Since you’ve already had some, have a couple more sips.” His voice was just as soft.
“What if I get drunk?”
“I’ll take you home.”
They were very close. She even felt that if either of them said one more word, their lips would touch. She could not help laughing as she opened the car door. After two years, she had not expected that just when she was finally about to leave and return home, she would run into an unexpected romantic encounter. There was both promise and temptation in those eyes.
With the way they had looked at each other just now, she had almost let things take their own course.
The wind and snow outside the car were indeed fierce, but many people were standing on the road and beside their cars, anxiously waiting for the snow to stop.
Nan Bei’s short hair was immediately blown into disarray, falling across her eyes. She had not yet shaken off the mood from before when suddenly, thunderous gunshots rang out. A bullet tore past her. Instinctively, she covered her head and crouched down.
How could this happen? How could there be a gunfight here?
Before she could even decide what to do, her right arm suddenly exploded with pain, and her entire body was dragged behind the car wheel.
“Don’t move. Don’t make any movement.”
The screams all around her, including the hysterical cries from inside the car, pierced her eardrums.
Nan Bei’s eyes went black from the pain, yet in her heart she wanted nothing more than to kill someone.
In the twenty years she had lived, she really had never known that getting shot could hurt this much...
When she woke again, it was because of the pain. She thought she was in a hospital, but unexpectedly, she was still miserably stuck in the back seat of the car, among this army of vehicles trapped in the more-than-900-kilometer traffic jam.
Fortunately, her arm had been bandaged. A doctor must have come by.
But if a doctor had come, why hadn’t they taken me to the hospital?
Cheng Mu somehow managed to persuade the other four people to leave them alone in the car.
“How are you?”
She was in so much pain that she used her other hand to clutch the wounded arm.
“Socialism really is better... In countries where people can legally obtain gun licenses, there are seventy or eighty thousand registered guns alone, and the actual number is probably over two million. You can even run into a Hollywood-level shootout in a traffic jam...”
Talking desperately did nothing. Hot tears continued streaming from her eyes.
She truly had never imagined that being shot could hurt this much. It was not only the wound. Her entire body hurt, as though the flesh were being peeled away from her.
In the end, she no longer knew whether it was the pain or exhaustion. She simply curled up, her hair falling messily across her face. Her eyes were unfocused, and all the color had completely drained from her face.
“Are you all right?” a voice asked her through the haze.
But her consciousness had already gone to another world.
No comments:
Post a Comment