Last Mile

Lin Yuan was once a top soldier of the fire service until a fire destroyed his legs and his life. After retiring, he opened a repair shop in the old city. He worked with wrenches and screws every day, thinking that his life would just go away. Until his former teammates pulled him to join the civilian rescue team. On his first mission, he picked up a mobile phone deep in an abandoned mine. There are no contacts in the phone, no call records, only an unsent text message, dated eight years ago today. "Save us." From then on, every rescue mission, the old man will receive a text message from the past. The owners of those text messages are no longer alive, but their last location, reason for being trapped, and surrounding environment are all clearly written on this elderly phone that should have run out of power long ago. Relying on these text messages, Lin Yuan found the miners who had been trapped for 72 hours under the rubble, rescued the grandparents and grandchildren who were scattered in the flood, and became the most trusted demolition hand of the international rescue team at the scene of the cross-border earthquake. But the father and daughter he really wanted to save died in a fire that he failed to rush out of eight years ago. Until the old man's machine unlocked the last grid of electricity. The screen lit up and a number was automatically dialed. On the other end of the phone, a girl said: "I'm Zhou Xiaoyu. That year you said you would come back."