When Will We Meet Again?

Smoke is a bone-eroding knife. A 250-cent pack of "Moat" brand cigarettes, wrapped in tinfoil with sulfur residue and sawdust. After taking a sip, the hot knife penetrated from the throat into the lungs, and the phlegm he coughed up was blood-streaked. Wu Baoguo and I squatted under the moat bridge and survived for ten years by scraping our frozen bones with this knife. Until he was treated like a rat and driven into the archives of the ruins of Xinlian. Just a man-eating beast. The emergency light tube exploded overhead, and the turbid light filled with the smell of rust hit my eyes. Wu Baoguo lay in a pool of blood, his intestines slipping out from the knife edge. He scratched my wrist, his eyeballs bulged out, and he yelled: "Look for... Yuehua... She has... On her wrist." Before he could finish his words, blood foam blocked his throat. The USB flash drive that fell out of the suit's body bag reflected the thorny mountains in the puddle of blood - like a cannibal tomb. Life is the key to the door. Only then did I realize that the tobacco poison I had swallowed for ten years had already eroded through my bone marrow. When the living metal abyss awakens deep in the "chimney", the lungs accustomed to the "moat" are the original fire that awakens it. The cold-blooded hunter's bullets chased behind him, and the tiles under his feet surged with a sticky metal tide, and the steel bars melted like candles wherever they passed. Fire is the light of reunion. When Wu Baoguo pressed the incendiary bomb into his leg, the smell of burnt flesh overwhelmed the blood. Flames danced across his bones, burning away the metal snakes that had burrowed into the wounds. I dragged my carbonized brother toward the ventilation shaft, hot shrapnel grazing my spine. In the roar of falling into the abyss, his burnt lips brushed against my ear: "Survive... Go to the old willow tree on the riverbank..." When the water from the moat pours into the chimney, when will the survivors meet again?